Author: Ali Smith
Title: Spring (Seasonal Quartet #3)
Year of publication: 2019
Page count: 336
Rating: ★★★
The third volume in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, an extended literary experiment in synchronicity, is the most explicitly political so far. The aftermath of Brexit is ever-present, but Spring is blunter, more polemical; Smith chronicles the growing tensions in the UK by making the global migrant crisis and treatment of refugees the novel’s main focus. Her usual light touch is made heavier by exasperation at a divided Britain and the state of the world—her moral fury is a swelling undercurrent. And yet, hope springs eternal.
“What if, the girl says. Instead of saying, this border divides these places. We said, this border unites these places. This border holds together these two really interesting different places. What if we declared border crossings places where, listen, when you crossed them, you yourself became doubly possible.”
First, we meet Richard, an aging director mourning the loss of his long-time collaborator Paddy; depressed and directionless, he boards a train north, without any particular destination in mind. Then, we meet Brit, a young detainee custody officer at an immigration removal centre recently visited by Florence, a mysterious child invisible enough to be able to enter forbidden spaces. One day, Florence stops Brit on her way into work, and they end up spontaneously traveling north in search of the location on a postcard. They all come together at a train station in Scotland, where they meet a librarian involved in an underground operation dedicated to helping detained immigrants. When Florence and Brit first meet, there’s a charming scene referencing Florence and the Machine, one of my favorite artists, and it ends up being a through-line for the rest of the novel—Brit represents a cog in a machine set to dehumanise, and “humanising the machine” is what Spring is all about.
In someone else’s hands, it all could’ve all easily come off as lecturing, but Smith is too deft a writer to fall into the trap of turning her novel into a mere soapbox—she’s very clever, but it’s a compassionate rather than alienating cleverness. As usual, there is a focus on art (in this instance, Tacita Dean, Katherine Mansfield, and Rainer Maria Rilke) and its power to express and unite, as well as numerous subtle, yet profoundly significant links to the previous novels; even though I liked Spring a smidgen less than the other two, my admiration for what Smith is doing just keeps growing. At the end of the book, spring is described as “the great connective“—an apt way to describe these remarkable novels that straddle timeliness and timelessness.
“The air lifts. It’s the scent of commencement, initiation, threshold. The air lets you know quite ceremonially that something has changed. Primroses. Deep in the ivy throw wide the arms of their leaves. Colour slashes across the everyday. The deep blue of grape hyacinths, the bright yellows in wastelands catching the eyes of the people on trains. Birds visit the leafless trees, but not leafless like in winter; now the branches stiffen, the ends of the twigs glow like slow-burning candles.”
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