spring by ali smith
I read Spring over my summer holiday. A little out of time, but then Ali Smith plays with time in the novel, weaving a story that jumps backwards and forwards through the years and seasons. If I tell you the plot of Spring it sounds rather disjointed: Richard, once a famous-ish director, stands on a platform of a station in Scotland, remembering the recent death of his close friend and collaborator. Elsewhere, Brit a 20-something, SA4A security officer, who works in a detention centre, goes to work and back home again, saying hello and goodbye to the hedges. Brit's life is full of acronyms designed to dehumanise the people she is paid to ensure remain imprisoned. And then there's Florence, a very Ali Smith character, an otherworldly, knowing child who can seemingly bend people to her will and can walk through walls and fences, infiltrating prisons with ease. Spring is also about Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke, Charlie Chaplin and Shakespeare, Beethoven and Brexit. Like all the books in the Season Quartet, Spring too has its artistic champion in Tacita Dean, specifically her cloud and mountain drawings in chalk. In Autumn it was Pauline Boty, in Winter it was Barbara Hepworth. Smith has the wonderful knack of drawing art into her words in a way that appears effortless. That these stories all interconnect seems outlandish. That there is no way the different time frames, art movements, politics and narratives can brush up against one another or even cause ripples though their respective stories. But they do, of course, they do. Smith has shown herself to be the master of such interconnectedness. She brought us How to be both, after all, the story of an Italian renaissance artist and a teenage girl that spoke so easily to each other, no matter the order you read them in.
I want to focus on a small detail though, a single sentence that struck me when reading Spring and that sums up for me why I enjoy Smith's work so much. It celebrates her ability to surprise and make the mundane ordinariness of life something extraordinary and to be observed and valued. In Smith's world the mundane happens easily alongside the miraculous because that is how life is. And what I think the Seasons Quartet is trying to do, what most novels are trying to do, is show life, real life. But Smith has the ability to make her fiction more real than reality. A child can walk into a detention centre unharmed and unnoticed and speak out loud the terrible injustices she sees of people imprisoned indefinitely without cause. She shows those who have been forgotten, who have been forced to be forgotten. Smith reminds us that the miraculous happens alongside the mundane, but that means so too does the profane.
Tacita Dean, Why cloud, 2016. Spray chalk, gouache and charcoal pencil on slate
So back to that sentence. Here is it, it's small and maybe you think it's nothing but it's still with me like a little seed in my pocket, the kernel of an idea that I've carried with me since I finished Spring:
The sky was a massive closed door.
What does that even mean? What does it mean when even the sky is closed off to you, when you cannot escape even upwards? But then I do know what a closed sky looks like, I know what it feels like when the air above you feels shut off and heavy and threatening. And massive too, big, too vast to comprehend. When it feels like everything is pressing in too close. In a single sentence Smith not only skewers the world anew but gives a narrative to something that I didn't even know needed a story. She shows the endless ingenuity to be found in writing, that there are as many ways of combining words as there are words and people to write them. In Spring, Richard, the director who is running away from the death of his best friend, recalls a visit to the RA to see the Tacita Dean exhibition. He recalls standing in front her drawing of a mountain made in chalk on blackboard. He describes it as "a black so dark it was like a new definition of blackness" and that "what he was looking at stopped being chalk on slate, stopped being a picture of a mountain. It became something terrible, seen." The mountain is an image of the sublime. The terrible in the remarkable. A girl who can walk into a prison. The sky that is a massive door, in a sentence of sublime intention. Something seen by being named. Richard's response is to utter out loud in the quiet gallery, "Fuck me". And reading the sky was a massive closed door, my only response was to put down the book for a moment and say, "Fuck me".
Spring is out now, published by Hamish Hamilton
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