Autumn by Ali Smith

Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic one-in-a-generation summer.

Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever…

Autumn is the first book in Ali Smith’s ‘seasonal quartet’. The cycle of the seasons plays into one of the main themes of this book: time and how we experience it.

The book is composed of a main timeline, set shortly after the Brexit vote in the UK, interspersed with dream-like chapters and flashbacks to earlier times. All of the scenes are pretty disjointed and the narrative is loose. Elisabeth is friends with a very old man, Daniel, who is an art historian whose specialist area is 1960s pop art. They discuss current affairs, art and the people around them. The timeline flashes backwards and forwards.

I take this to be a representation of the fact that life is not linear or necessarily structured. Perhaps Autumn is structured like a human mind. Taking myself as an example, I rarely focus on what is in front of me; my mind is constantly wandering to things that happened yesterday or years ago, or thinking about things I might do in the future, or simply imagining things. (I think I am unusually un-present actually.) It is a bit jarring to read on the physical page a representation of the leaping around that our minds do but it highlights how different a structured ‘story’ is to reality.

One other thing I did notice whilst reading Autumn is that the lack of speech marks made me feel like I was being held at arms’ length from the narrative. It made me read the whole book in a deadpan voice in my head. It was rather strange because I have read plenty of other novels that use that technique but Autumn is the only one which has made me feel particularly disconnected to the book’s world.

This book might be easier to digest if you were to study it and delve further into its themes or psychology. As a casual reader of Autumn, though, I have to say I just didn’t quite get it.