We've already had a book called Summer, by Edith Wharton.

But this one is by Ali Smith. It was published in 2020, and it's the last of her Seasonal Quartet (although rumour has it there's "a scheme-busting fifth part").

I really loved Autumn; was still a fan after reading Winter, although with a few reservations; but found Spring too tendentious to be really enjoyable.

Summer still does have its irritants. Smith's characters, for example, are sometimes more like place-holders. As Claire Wills (in a brilliant review that's well worth reading in full) comments: "We watch Smith’s flattened, caricature people become allegorical figures -- or rather, since the traffic goes in every direction, we watch them flicker back and forth between caricature, character and allegory."



And Summer (unlike the others) also took me a little while to get into.

The opening exposition is about our growing indifference to all the crap that's happening in the world. "So?" is the refrain. That half-aggressive, half-defensive expression of powerless opting out: Yes, what you've just said or shown me is truly terrible, but what do you expect me to DO about it? How can I be anything other than affronted if you even suggest I MIGHT do something about it?

So far, so good. Then we meet a new family. Mum and daughter (Grace and Sacha) are discussing sources. As in internet sources. Which are a problem, it's true, because people say all sorts of things, and then wrongly attribute them to famous people. I agree with Grace (you need to track down REAL sources), even though Grace is the one who voted for Brexit (splitting the family so that Dad, Jeff, leaves -- he ends up living next door with his girlfriend, Ashley, but we don't hear a lot about her). Sacha may be flaky about tracing sources, but she's an engaged young woman, and means well. Her brother, Robert, on the other hand, is a piece of work. Probably not his fault (he was bullied), and we're not really encouraged to blame him, but I found page after page of his right-wing, attention-seeking, manosphere-devoted prickery really hard to read calmly.

I was delighted, therefore, to leave them all behind, and join Daniel Gluck again. Yes, indeed... Ancient Daniel, from Autumn. He's now 104... Some bloggers are all: Why are we leaving that interesting contemporary family to take up with this old guy? I'm: Oh, wow, thank goodness we're back with Daniel, and Elisabeth, his long-standing young friend and well-wisher, both of whom I liked so much last time.

AND we get the Isle of Man, where Daniel and his father were interned for a while during WWII as enemy aliens. Theirs was the Hutchinson Square camp, known as the "artists' camp" because of the number of talented people confined there. More on that elsewhere.


Hutchinson Square in its days as an internment camp


Architect Bruno Ahrends, painted by fellow internee Kurt Schwitters, a Dadaist artist


Also in that same camp was writer and painter Fred Uhlman, whose daughter was born just after he was imprisoned. Daniel talks about his Children with Balloons, depicting "a small girl holding a balloon bobbing on a string ... walking through hell"

***

Then there's the thing that Smith's brilliant elements (more on them in a minute) do sometimes come close to being engulfed by the elements that are just too -- well, too much. I'm not the only one who has that feeling:

-- Maria Vigornia wonders: "Does she come close to overwhelming us with her allusions, her diction, her craft? Yes."
-- Wills reflects: "The emphasis on chance encounters and linguistic echoes isn’t always successful, and there are longueurs... You get the sense that Smith has sometimes put things in because she can and not because she must."
-- Madeleine Gray, pointing out that most authors have their tics, and you either love them or hate them, continues: "Readers new to Ali Smith’s fiction are faced with a similar ultimatum: either give in or get out. Smith’s idiosyncrasies are plentiful, her oeuvre chock-a-block with a recurring parade of themes (the power of art; time’s non-linearity; the puncturing of middle-class self-importance), rhetorical devices (puns; wordplay; self-conscious, philosophical onomatopoeia), character tropes (a mysterious stranger who makes everyone revaluate their lives; a precocious child who sees what adults don’t; a wise, older figure who knows a lot about art history), and aesthetic attachments (including but not limited to: the work of Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Barbara Hepworth, Shakespeare and The Seekers)."

Summer ties together many of the threads that the other three volumes have dangled in front of us. And you have to be prepared for some fairly unlikely coincidences... Sacha, victim of a stupid prank of Robert's, is rescued by none other than Charlotte and Art (from Winter). They're on a mission to fulfil Art's mother's dying request, which is to return something to someone in Suffolk. Robert, meanwhile, is obsessed with Einstein, who hung out near Cromer for a while during the war. So Grace, Sacha, and Robert end up accompanying Art and Charlotte on their road trip. To me this all sounds a bit far-fetched.

Then the reader finds out that they really ARE all connected. We have already suspected that Daniel is Art's father. Well, he is. The thing Art's mother wanted to be returned is the bit of Daniel's Hepworth sculpture that she took away with her. Art and Elizabeth fall in love. Of course. And Robert and Sacha turn out to be the great-grandchildren of Daniel's sister, Hannah (a Resistance worker in WWII France, whom we believe to have made provision for her daughter before being killed).

Again, I can't help but baulk at this. But Smith's bit of brilliance here is that while the reader is made aware of these connections, the characters aren't. They all go their merry ways, happy to have met (especially Art and Elizabeth), but unaware that there's anything deeper.

Two points arising from all this:

A central theme of Smith's, firstly, is our human need for the good-hearted mutual kindness that we traditionally associate with families -- and the parallel reality that we may need to provide and accept this kindness without the presence of blood ties.

So we perhaps don't know who might be connected to us by blood -- but it shouldn't really matter... As Wills explains: "All the principal characters across the four books lose a parent or a child, but in finding alternatives and substitutes 'something family happens', and Smith leaves us in no doubt that something family is better than actual family. This is largely because parents, exhausted cogs in a domestic machine, have lost access to the imagination. It’s the people without children -- the childless, the children themselves -- who are able to maintain the grace through which a life encounters and enters another life, and that mothers like Grace (the irony) have lost... So ancient Daniel, or eighty-something Iris from Winter..., are the bearers of enchantment, practitioners of a dispossessing kind of love -- one that gives but isn’t worried about whether it receives. The quartet is a hymn to the transformations of one-way love."

Wills opens her review with the observation that "mothers have a hard time in Ali Smith novels". And it's true that many of them seem to have been forced into very small moulds: "As with Elisabeth’s mother in Autumn, Art’s mother in Winter and Brit’s mother in Spring, Grace’s own world has been largely reduced to the language and images she’s fed by TV." Not that Smith judges them, any more than she judges Robert. Most ordinary people aren't truly evil. They're just complacent, or lost, or sad, or they've had all the questioning beaten out of them by life.

But it's by listening to people (mothers or no) that we offer them a chance at self-respect and goodness. Charlotte, for example, becomes aware that the much younger Robert has become infatuated with her. She doesn't make fun of him. She talks to him, and goes out of her way to be nice to him. This listening ear, Andeweg and Jankovic remind us, was exactly what was denied to Brit, the not very likeable character, in Spring.


Hutchinson Square today

The second point about the somewhat unlikely plotting is that Smith is essentially arguing for the power of art.

Grace, once an actress, played Hermione in a touring production of The Winter's Tale. At one point, the noblewoman Paulina, before the statue of Leontes’s wife Hermione comes back to life, instructs those in attendance: "It is required you do awake your faith." Wills comments: "The sentence hovers behind all the goings on in Summer. Take a leap of faith, Smith says, a leap of imagination, and art becomes life, imagination becomes reality. She goes further, in fact: 'it is required', it is 'necessary'; if we don’t awaken our faith in art and the imagination we are lost. And she really believes it."

Andeweg and Jankovic point out the centrality of hospitality in all four books. There's literal hospitality, of course, either institutional or personal, either offered or denied. And Smith is also fond of demonstrating "linguistic hospitality" -- the ways in which "language itself is capable of including, welcoming, and being hospitable through specific grammatical or semantic choices". There's also, however, a kind of hospitality that's "performed on a narrative level, through the ways in which different stories and events are combined, or in how the narrator intervenes". We are never moving only in one direction through time with Smith. When she opens up her story to other timeframes, texts, lives, and works of art, she puts all this alongside her characters, "creating a conversation for the reader between the storyworld of characters and these other lives, forming new connections and modes of 'togetherness'... The reader must accommodate the intertextual and intermedial references, or 'provide a home' to all these 'Others' who are knocking at the door of the novel."

From that point of view, my incredulity (and slight impatience at all the crowds of cultural figures) seem somehow petty...

***

Summer, then, adds another layer to the collage the other three parts have begun. A truly amazing Goodreads reviewer has lovingly chronicled all the recurring elements -- female artists, Shakespeare plays, Dickens opening lines, TV relationships, the theme of fences and internment, the shadowy security firm SA4A, and more -- and it's clear that Smith is an educator. She wants to enrich your life. And sure enough, you end up forgiving so much because of how profound it is...


The female artist whom Smith focuses on in this part of the quartet is film-maker, painter, and writer Lorenza Mazzetti. Hers is the film sequence described near the beginning (the man carrying two suitcases while balancing on a narrow ledge on a high building); Smith also references her film about trauma (Together). Mazzetti had a terrible war experience, but channelled her pain into art


From Mazzetti's Family Album. Here the family is receiving guests. All is peaceful and orderly


And then everything is upended. Violence is at the door

Some of the byways she leads us down are fascinating. With Smith, I'm always looking something up. For example:

1. Swifts... All the miles they travel... Once they leave the nest, they spend two to three years on the wing until it's time to raise the next generation. Eating, drinking, sleeping, mating -- it's all done in the air. And when they travel, they TRAVEL. They can cover up to 800 km in a day, and in the migration speed stakes, they're up there near the top. Humans seem so plodding in comparison...

2. The word "summer" is derived from Old English "sumor", which comes, in turn, from the Proto-Indo-European "sam", meaning one or together. Wait, I thought. The Malay/Indonesian for together is "sama/bersama". Are they connected? It seems they are, with many people suggesting that "sama" is a loan word from Sanskrit (part of the Indo-European language family). I can't find a really good source for this, though, and you know what Grace would have said...

3. Then there's the Einstein theme. Forced to leave Germany, he did stay in Cromer... Well, strictly speaking, Roughton Heath, which is near enough to Cromer to walk to (as we did, a couple of times during precisely that 2020 covid summer). He was the guest of MP Oliver Locker-Lampson, but stayed in a cabin, guarded by local men, as ongoing death threats made it seem inadvisable for him to live openly in the MP's summer home.


Taken on one of our Roughton walks

***

When Summer won the 2020 Orwell Prize for political fiction, the judges called Smith "the great chronicler of our age". And indeed, the essence of the seasonal project was "to narrow the gap not only between a novel’s conception and its publication, but between art and the reality it consumes in order to produce itself". Autumn was published in the year of the Brexit vote; Winter came hard on the heels of Trump's election first time round; Spring picked up on stories of hardening borders; and Summer begins a week after Brexit (that's actual Brexit, as opposed to the Brexit vote). Of course, Smith had to somehow integrate covid into that one, too...

In this sense, I found Summer a little too specific, too time-bound. It felt almost dated. Which is a political thing in itself, of course. The unspeakable Boris, the whole covid fiasco... We're so into other horrors now... Angry Iris (the aging activist from Spring) says to covid-depressed, Art-depressed Charlotte: "You should all be writing about the PPE shortage." And it actually took me a little while to remember that PPE was Personal Protective Equipment, and not Philosophy, Politics, and Economics...

Summer continues to bring us political points of view. They're strongly voiced, but much dialled back from Spring (a good thing), and they're often amusing. Here's Iris again, in great form, giving Charlotte a few more subjects she can write about: "About a too-late response from a useless and distracted government who never thought for a minute they'd end up governing anything. Whose only thought about the state was how to dismantle it as fast as possible. Who thought it was all going to be such a BLAST, being in power, making lots of money for themselves and their pals."

Tell it, Iris...

***


La petite fille aux feuilles mortes, photographed by Edouard Boubat in 1947. This motif goes through all four books

Throughout the quartet we're asked to face the question of what art is about. Towards the end of Summer, as Charlotte emerges from the covid funk we all experienced at some point, she points out: "What art DOES is, it exists... And then because we encounter it, we remember we exist too. And that one day we won't." Wills (yet again): "The quartet makes extraordinarily ambitious claims for art, and paints a bleak vision of a future without it. Knowledge won’t save us from a repeat of the horrors of the past; history, evidence, 'news' and information won’t save us. True understanding, and therefore change, can only come from the magic that is the imagination."

The meaning of art is closely linked to the experience of wonder. The main story ends with Sacha and Robert and Charlotte: "They stood under a night sky in a car park where Einstein himself perhaps maybe possibly once stood and looked up at the lit pinpoints in the dark that meant the ancient and original and already dead stars." That's undeniably an uplifting thought...

But the actual close is a message from Anh Kiet, the detainee to whom kind, idealistic Sacha has been writing. He has been released from his detention centre (the government not wanting to deal with the bad publicity of mass covid deaths in poorly ventilated state-imposed places). And he has been provided with a home by good old Iris. He writes to tell Sacha that he has seen one of those swifts she has been talking about, and believes it will return to her "in the shape of members of its family". I love Gray's exposition of this: "The idea is that nothing is not connected, that when we are displaced we place our love and our hope into surrogates and symbols -- be they letters unsent or birds in the sky. We hope that our love reaches those who need it, in whatever form. And as we do this, the seasons keep on turning. Summer might come again, and what else can we hope for?"

As a whole, the series talks to us of interdependence; togetherness and connections; and repeated patterns. Smith herself says in an interview: "There are connections working away in us and all round us all the time, whether we notice or we don’t, and these can be both slight and profound, and the only thing we can do is honour the connective process with everything we’ve got, if we don’t want to miss out on our own pasts and futures, or on what forms us and how we’re forming what comes after us."

That's probably a good note to end on.


Contemporary artwork in Hutchinson Square