Summer’s surely really all about an imagined end. We head for it instinctually like it must mean something. We’re always looking for it, looking to it, heading towards it all year, the way a horizon holds the promise of a sunset. We’re always looking for the full open leaf, the open warmth, the promise that we’ll one day soon surely be able to lie back and have summer done to us; one day soon we’ll be treated well by the world. Like there really is a kinder finale and it’s not just possible but assured, there’s a natural harmony that’ll be spread at your feet, unrolled like a sunlit landscape just for you.
Care free.
What a thought.
Summer.
The Summer's Tale.
There's no such play, Grace.
Don't be fooled.
“Summer” is variously defined here as a lintel (the most important beam, structurally, in a building), as a horse that can carry a great weight, as the season most overloaded with our expectations. That’s a lot of pressure for Ali Smith to put on her own Summer — the final volume in her Seasonal quartet — but, too, Smith writes: “Summers can take it. That’s why we call them summers.” Once again, Smith has released a volume written completely in the moment (she may have started this thinking her themes would continue to concentrate on climate change, the rise of right wing politics, and refugee detainee camps, but she was able to organically include COVID-19 and the death of George Floyd as though her narrative had been inevitably moving towards those world-changing events all along), and taken together, I simply can’t imagine a more appropriate encapsulation and exploration of our moment in time. I think that Summer did an amazing job of tying everything together, and while Autumn was the absolute standout of the series for me, and although the other three in the quartet merited four stars on their own, this is definitely a five star series overall; I can imagine this being read and studied deep into the future and look forward to soon rereading all four as a cohesive experience. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Well, that’s what art is, maybe. Something that impresses mysteriously on you and you don’t know why.
Perhaps this definition for art is all I really need to write, and while I don’t want to rehash the plot for Summer here, I do want to record some impressions. As in the first three volumes, Smith invokes Dickens (the beginning of the actual plot echoes David Copperfield) and Shakespeare (this time, The Winter’s Tale) and we are introduced to another woman artist who deserves to be better remembered (the visual artist, novelist, and filmmaker Lorenza Mazzetti). There are references to Chaplin and Einstein, and along with frequent punning and word play, there’s a revisit with the sculpture of Barbara Hepworth that allows for word play on Einstein’s name. Characters from the first three volumes are reintroduced and we learn more about their pasts and see the threads of their present all tied up (the deep state agents of SA4A make another appearance, demonstrating how bureaucratic overreach inevitably leads to the comically absurd). And while — perhaps particularly in a COVID lockdown — it’s easy to despair that the world is closer to its doomsday than ever before, Smith offers up the twin meaning-makers of art and activism.
It’s not incidental that Smith has populated these books with so many artists: confronted by their own doomsday times, they, like Smith in this quartet, strove to create meaning out of mortality:
What art does is exist. And then because we encounter it, we remember we exist too. And that one day we won’t.
And with several generations of British activists giving their opinions on the present in Summer, Smith reminds us that it is always doomsday somewhere:
Yes, it’s surreal for us here right now. But it’s never not a state of emergency somewhere. We’re naive if we think life normally isn’t surreal as fuck for most people scraping a living on this earth
The overall philosophy of the series seems to be: When we are confronted with confusing and dangerous times, we ought to strive to make meaning and help others; it was ever so; the seasons will continue to follow one upon the other, world without end, but the fate of humanity lies in human hands. This is the masterwork of a deep thinker; it is art and I find myself, thereby, mysteriously impressed.
