Winter

That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again. An exercise in adapting yourself to whatever frozen or molten state it brings you.

Ah, this is exactly what I warned about in my gushing review of Autumn, a book that spoke to me deeply and particularly: Winter is quite a good book, Ali Smith explores many of the same issues in the same ways as she did in her earlier volume in the Seasonal Series, but without a direct connection to my own idiosyncratic pleasure centers, this one didn't excite me as much. Still a good read from a master of postmodern storytelling:

And here instead’s another version of what was happening that morning, as if from a novel in which Sophia is the kind of character she’d choose to be, prefer to be, a character in a much more classic sort of story, perfectly honed and comforting, about how sombre yet bright the major-symphony of winter is and how beautiful everything looks under a high frost, how every grassblade is enhanced and silvered into individual beauty by it, how even the dull tarmac of the roads, the paving under our feet, shines when the weather's been cold enough and how something at the heart of us, at the heart of all our cold and frozen states, melts when we encounter a time of peace on earth, goodwill to all men; a story in which there is no room for severed heads; a work in which Sophia’s perfectly honed minor-symphony modesty and narrative decorum complement the story she’s in with the right kind of quiet wisdom-from-experience ageing-female status, making it a story that’s thoughtful, dignified, conventional in structure thank God, the kind of quality literary fiction where the slow drift of snow across the landscape is merciful, has a perfect muffling decorum of its own, snow falling to whiten, soften, blur and prettify even further a landscape where there are no heads divided from bodies hanging around in the air or anywhere, either new ones, from new atrocities or murders or terrorisms, or old ones, left over from old historic atrocities and murders and terrorisms and bequeathed to the future as if in old French Revolution baskets, their wickerwork brown with the old dried blood, placed on the doorsteps of the neat and central-heating-interactive houses of now with notes tied to the handles saying please look after this head thank you,

well, no,

thank you,

thank you very much.

The above (overly long) excerpt was chosen not just for the wintry imagery and the po-mo self-awareness, but also because of the book's recurring theme of recurring atrocities, and the power that the people have in protesting a government that doesn't work for you: whether violently, as in the French Revolution, or nonviolently, as in the Greenham Common protests that Smith asserts changed Britain's nuclear weapons policy. Of course Sophia would rather be a character in a more straightforward type of novel; perhaps something by Dickens – but despite the midwinter setting, something more A Tale of Two Cities than A Christmas Carol; there will be no ghosts here, but severed heads abound. And as in Autumn, Shakespeare is invoked: I loved the image of Art squirming as Lux summarises the plot of Cymbeline for his family (because, not being familiar with the play himself, he assumed she was making it up), and I snorted when later, Art gives this same summary to a Shakespearean expert and he preens as she admires his insight (and surely this ties back into women artists everywhere and the men who take credit for their work). In a related thread about the recurrence of history and the debt we owe our ancestors, is this bit about a young Croatian-Canadian woman's reaction to seeing her family's genealogy stretching back hundreds of years:

I was seventeen, walking along a street in Toronto and I stopped and just stood there in the middle of Queen Street because the day went dark all round me even though it was the middle of the day, and I knew for the first time I was, I am, carrying on my head, like a washerwoman or a waterwoman, not just one container or basket, but hundreds of baskets all balanced on each other, full to their tops with bones, high as a skyscraper, and they were so heavy on my head and shoulders that either I was going to have to offload them or they were going to drive me down through the pavement to the ground. 

This all ties in with Brexit and efforts to expel illegal immigrants and aren't we all one family anyway? There are references to Trump, to Teresa May, Syrian refugees, and the Grenfell Tower fire; with an ageing hippy character, we read the voice of protest, but also recognise the subtext of plus ça change. Just as Autumn explored the art of Pauline Boty, Winter introduces the work of sculptor Barbara Hepworth (with Smith seeming to suggest that her own writing should be seen in the same light as Hepworth's art; as something that “makes you walk round it, it makes you look through it from different sides, see different things from different positions. It’s also like seeing inside and outside something at once.”) I liked that Art is a writer of terrible blog posts, and I loved that Daniel from Autumn makes an appearance as a younger man. 

That's life, and time, for you.

There's politics, art, feminism, and a traditional plot, but Winter didn't blow me away. (Actually, I'd say that Moshin Hamid handled similar material much more ably in Exit West.) Four stars is a rounding up and I happily await Spring.