New discoveries: Ali Smith

The most welcome change in our local area in the last few months is that we now have a local bookshop, [Storysmith Books](https://storysmithbooks.com/), and no longer have to traipse into town to Waterstones or Foyles or give our money to Jeff Bezos. I’ve always loved hanging around in bookshops (and record shops) since I was teenager, browsing, discovering new things, and that has become so much harder to do since the internet started killing the high street.

A couple of weeks before Christmas I was browsing in Storysmith, not very sure of what I wanted, and came across the first couple of volume’s of Ali Smith’s in-progress Seasons quartet *Autumn* and *Winter*. When things are in a sequence it is helpful to know what’s first, so I had to check that I wasn’t supposed to start with *Spring* or *Summer* (and indeed they’re still being written). Actually, though *Autumn* is first, the novels are quite independent (so far) and I could have read them in either order. Both *Autumn* and *Winter* are set in post-referendum Britain and the plots unfold against its division and dysfunctionality, but neither is didactically political. Each has at its centre a disruptive character who serves as a kind of moral and aesthetic exemplar: in *Autumn* it is Daniel Gluck, dying in a care-home at the age of 101 and the history of his friendship from her childhood with Elisabeth Demand a precariously employed young art historian, and his role in awakening her aesthetic sensibilty (and more broadly sensibility to life, nature). The Profumo Affair and the almost-forgotten British pop artist from the sixties, Pauline Boty, thread through the novel. In *Winter*, the action is centred around Christmas, a nature-blogger called Art who is a bit of a fraud and his trip home to see his entrepreneurial Leaver mother. Here the key relationship is between mother and her estranged sister (formerly of Greenham Common) and the disrupter is a young woman, Lux, hired by Art to impersonate the girlfriend who just dumped him. Both are wonderful books, and reminders that even against grey political skies, we can catch glimpses of beauty and spirit.

Having consumed these, and facing a wait till March for the next installment, I went looking for earlier work and finished *The Accidental*, yesterday, in which a middle-class English family, spending the summer in Norfolk, find their sense of themselves transformed by a mysterious visitor, Amber, who challenges each of them with a Nietzschean playfulness that is by turns benign and malevolent. It is a long time since I was twelve, but Smith’s imagining of the inner monologues of Astrid, the daughter and her elder brother Magnus is transporting. The theme: a family that is unhappy in its own way disturbed and changed by a chance encounter is very Anne Tylerish. But whilst Tyler’s prose is unshowy, Smith plays with language the whole time, punning, rhyming, even having characters think in sonnet form at one point. And she does this lightly and unpretentiously so that you are delighted rather than irritated. (The lightness and playfulness coupled with deadly seriousness about life and history also reminded me a lot of Pauline Erpenbeck.)

I can see that reading more Smith will take up quite a lot of the year to come.