Spring

The seasons are meaningless. No – worse than meaningless. Paddy is rubble, and time just keeps on going. Autumn, then there'll be winter. Then there'll be spring, and so on.

Ali Smith's Seasonal Series is such an interesting project: setting semi-related stories in our immediate here and now, released quickly over the span of a couple of years, Smith couldn't possibly have predicted the absolute specifics of where we are today, and yet she presciently chose some interesting strings to follow (lucky, if you could call it that, that Smith began as Brexit and Trump and the refugee crisis were all set to dominate the headlines). Each book in the series has satisfyingly built upon what preceded it, but I have to admit once again that Autumn stands out for me, by far, as the best of the bunch. Nevertheless, Spring is thought-provoking, accessible, sometimes angrymaking, oftentimes funny, and when I consider the series as a whole, probably one of the few things that I can see people still reading years from now; Smith is artfully preserving our times for future generations; word-painting the clouds before they disappear into ozone and memory. But as depressing as some of the situations she writes about undoubtedly are, there is something very hopeful and cleansing about spring that seems to be what Smith is stressing here – winter may be harsh, but it doesn't last forever:

The plants that push up through the junk and the plastic, earlier, later, they're coming regardless. The plants shift beneath you regardless, the people in sweatshops, the people out shopping, the people at desks in the light off their screens or scrolling their phones in the surgery waiting rooms, the protesters shouting, wherever, whatever the city or country, the light shifts, the flowers nod next to the corpseheap and next to the places you live and the places you drink yourself stupid or happy or sad and the places you pray to your gods and the big supermarkets, the people on motorways speeding past verges and scrubland like nothing is happening. Everything is. The flowerheads open all over the flytip. The light shifts across your divides, round the people with passports, the people with money, the people with nothing, past sheds and canals and cathedrals, your airports, your graveyards, whatever you bury, whatever you dig up to call it your history or drill down to use up for money, the light shifts regardless.

The truth is a kind of regardless.

The winter's a nothing to me.

Do you think I don't know about power? You think I was born green?

I was.

Spring opens with the story of a man who is weathering the despair of his own emotional winter: Richard Lease is an aging television director who has recently lost his best friend and collaborator, the witty and erudite screenwriter Patricia “Paddy” Heal. In the process of working on a terrible script when Paddy succumbs to cancer, Richard decides to get on a train to nowhere, and finds himself alighting in the Scottish Highlands. In the second section, we meet Brittany Hall – a Detainee Custody Officer working for SA4A (Smith's shadowy, recurring security firm) at a UK Immigration Removal Centre – and we watch as Brit casually dehumanises the men under her control whose only crime (and reason for indefinite detention) is to have escaped to Britain in search of safety. When Brit crosses paths with a runaway schoolgirl, she feels protective enough to follow her onto a train which also happens to be heading for Scotland. Naturally, the storylines converge, but I couldn't have predicted quite how Smith would fit it all together.

Along the way, Smith adds in some recurring themes from the entire series: There is a mother who needs mothering; a precocious young girl; an underappreciated female artist (in this case, Tacita Dean and her chalk paintings of clouds); Shakespeare (the schoolgirl, Florence, is apparently based on Marina from Pericles; not that I would have recognised that fact); Dickens (each of the books in this series has opened with a riff on an opening line from Dickens, and Spring's opener, “Now what we don't want is facts” is a play on Hard Times', “NOW, what I want is, Facts.”); the (fictional) SA4A is controlling people's lives, apparently without being answerable to the people; and a couple of characters from earlier books in the series are alluded to, so we understand it's all the same universe. 

I appreciated all the ways in which Smith includes clouds in Spring – from Tacita Dean's “Why Cloud” (whose title is based on a line from Pericles), to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “The Cloud”, to Paddy's sons losing all of their pictures of her from the cloud, and a detainee straining to watch the clouds go by through a sheet of Perspex in the ceiling – and I'm actually a little disappointed that my edition of the book doesn't have a David Hockney tree on the front cover or a Tacita Dean cloud on the back (here, the cover shows a cloudy painting entitled “Summer, 1922”  by Boris Kustodiev, which might be curiously out of season but does harken a year that is important to the storyline). And I liked (if that is the right word) the streams of internet vitriol and creepy data mining that Smith assembles into long, prosey poems; if that doesn't encapsulate our times, I don't know what does. And I loved the focus that Smith trained on those invisible folks that we tend to overlook in our every day lives:

My face is a breaking point.

Don't mention it. Any time.

It's the face you see on dramas, films, or you picture in your head in the novels about people who aren't you, the books you read because you love literature, or to kill some free time, the ones that tell the stories that let you feel that you've felt, you've been really importantly moved, more, you've understood something major about the history, the politics, of the time you've lived in.

It's nothing. My pleasure. My face is all about you.

My face trodden in mud.

My face bloated by sea.

What my face means is not your face.

By all means. You're welcome.

Ouch. But while there is an angry undercurrent in Spring, there is also hope and decent people and the promise of renewal, and if nothing else, the certainty that the planet will keep revolving through its seasons with or without us humans on it; keep revolving regardless. A satisfying read on its own; a fascinating addition to the overall project.