Autumn

Autumn – Ali Smith

“It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Again. That’s the thing about things. They fall apart”. Autumn’s beginning, with a twist on Charles Dickens’s famous opening lines and Chinua Achebe’s famous title, conveys a sense of hopelessness. It is a grandiose opening to reflect that the novel is dealing with the state of a nation.

We are later told that it is “an old story so new it’s still in the middle of happening, writing itself right now with no knowledge of where or how it will end”. And it does feel very current. Known as the first ‘post-Brexit novel’, Ali Smith writes against a backdrop of hate and disarray in the present day. We see this when Elizabeth stays with her mother and they walk past racist messages on walls, for example. One chapter is devoted entirely to the situation of the country. The seemingly endless repetition of “all across the country […]” with sets of contradictions, reflects the brokenness of the United Kingdom: “all across the country, the country was divided”.

She also writes about the pervasiveness of the media with its endless reels of news stories: “someone killed an MP […] but it’s old news now. Once it would have been a year’s worth of news. But news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff”, conveying the absurdity of the situation.

We begin in the middle of things, in what seems to be Daniel’s dream. Daniel, is an elderly figure sleeping in a hospital bed, visited by Elisabeth, an art history lecturer who grew up living next door to him. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn of their relationship, her childhood, the life lessons he has taught her and the way in which he has changed her life irreversibly. So, it is also a personal story as well as a national and historical one.

The second chapter is a complete contrast to the surreal dream, what could be more ordinary than a trip to the post office? Elisabeth, goes to get her passport application checked and sent but ends up waiting for hours and having an almost farcical encounter with the post office clerk – ridiculous, but also relatable, reminiscent of many an absurd customer service experience, the kind that may only be funny in hindsight. The humour comes from Smith’s matter-of-fact tone, Elisabeth’s “sarky” replies and the way in which the reader is positioned outside of the interaction, but close enough to relate to it.

It is a very self-conscious and reflective novel. We learn from Daniel the importance of stories and the age old contradiction that fiction brings its own truth. He tells Elisabeth that she should always be reading. And when she tells him, “the world exists. Stories are made up” he says that it doesn’t mean they are not true.

We are pushed to see the realism of the novel whilst Smith also emphasises the novel as a construct. The man in the post office tells Elisabeth, “This isn’t fiction […]. This is the post office.” And when she looks up from reading a Shakespeare quote to see a coin commemorating Shakespeare’s death she sees it as “one of those coincidences that on TV and in books might mean something but in real life meant nothing at all”. Smith steps into the realms of metafiction which brings with it a sense of irony.

It is also a stream of consciousness narrative that feels fast-paced but with disjointed interruptions. We are forced to consider the varying experiences of time, the past, the present, and the ever-changing, unfaltering cycle of the seasons. We are confronted with the shortness of life and the experience of ageing. Like autumn the season, Autumn the novel feels elegiac. Elisabeth clings onto Daniel, perhaps with a nostalgia for her childhood, a relationship free from the constraints of society and for his ability to transcend time through stories. Currently, he is sleeping through the crisis. We are told of an episode where to illustrate that time flies “literally”, he takes off his watch and throws it into the canal – there are plenty of humorous interludes.

It is also a story about art, about Pauline Boty, the only female in the Pop Art Movement, who is mainly overlooked by critics and perhaps Daniel’s only love. Her story and Elisabeth’s research into her life and works is integrated into the narrative in a somewhat fragmented way.

The ending is more hopeful: Daniel wakes up and utters his usual refrain “what you reading”, and though we move to November, “there are still roses. In the damp and the cold, on a bush that looks done, there’s a wide open rose, still.” I feel that Ali Smith is pointing to the importance of small things, of beauty even in times of crisis, of the significance in seemingly insignificant things. As Daniel tells Elisabeth when she is worried about forgetting her dad, sometimes we need to forget, “we have to forget. Or we’d never sleep ever again.” The novel allows us moments of ‘sleep’, of dreams and fond stories, but also confronts us with the shocking reality of the present.