A Revolutionary Writer for Our Darkest Days

After the 2016 EU referendum that changed the United Kingdom’s political trajectory for years to come, novelist Ali Smith had a revolutionary idea: writing a series of novels set in Brexit Britain, to be written and published in time to mirror the drama unfolding in her home country. What’s known as the “Seasonal Quartet,” due to each novel carrying the name of a season, is a breathtakingly beautiful series that has been showered with accolades from the moment the first book, “Autumn,” was published. 

Each volume, while fiction, captures many of the issues facing Brits in this brave new Brexit world, as just across the Atlantic, Donald Trump rules the U.S. with the same disdain for facts that many argue was behind the campaign that led the British public to vote for leaving the European Union. And yet, despite grim circumstances, Smith uses her considerable writing talents to uncover hope for a better future, often in the form of radical ideas and activism that shake characters and readers from complacency. In “Winter,” the second book in the series, the Scottish author tackles xenophobia and family divisions over politics by placing four incredibly different characters in one imagined Cornish household, where the all-too-human interactions among them become a catalyst for healing. “Spring,” the latest installment in the “Seasonal Quartet,” depicts a crossroads between strangers that are all changed in meaningful ways by their encounter with a young girl, not too unlike the real-life teen activist Greta Thunberg. That meeting forces them to question the dark, seemingly thoughtless paths they and the United Kingdom are barreling down.  

In a discussion about everything from refugees to Shakespeare, I caught up with Smith via email. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our exchange.

NATASHA HAKIMI ZAPATA: Why have you chosen seasons to title your novels set in Brexit Britain? What have you gained from structuring your “Seasonal Quartet” using this specific measure of time? Have you lost anything, or had moments when you wished you hadn’t chosen this framework? Did climate change and its impact on the seasons as we once knew them play a part in this creative choice?

ALI SMITH: I didn’t choose it—it just happened. In 2014 I handed in a manuscript to my publisher here in the U.K., Simon Prosser at Hamish Hamilton and Penguin, a book called “How to Be Both.” I’d missed its promised publishing deadline by a year or so, and I apologized to him. He laughed and said, “You haven’t missed the deadline, we can still bring the book out to time.”

I was amazed. “How to Be Both” is a novel with an ostensibly complex structure, one that exists in two forms that look on the surface exactly the same and are then randomly mixed in the print run, so that, depending on coincidence, when you pick up this book you might get one half at the beginning, or you might get the other half first instead. Sure enough, even given all the usual copy editing and proofing and printing schedule constraint, AND with this randomized structural print-mix thrown in, six weeks later I held the physical finished novel, in both its forms, in my hands. Not just that, it was a physical object of real care and beauty.

So then I began to wonder why the publishing process habitually takes so long, usually at least nine months, from handing in a manuscript to the finished thing. Since I began writing fiction, since roughly 1993, I’d been thinking about writing a series of books named after the seasons, and I’d always had them at the back of my head as a possibility maybe for when I was older.  This fast turnaround brought these books into focus for me in a new way. Because—what if you could write novels about time, but to time, so that you published them as close to their being written as possible and so that they held something truly contemporary somewhere in them, which would then be naturally offset by them tapping into the ever-cycling cycle of the changes and repetitions of season. And wouldn’t that be akin to what the novel actually means as a form—to when the Victorians published novels, when the novel still meant what it’s named for, something new, novel, the latest thing?

I asked Simon would it be possible—because I knew it would be asking a great deal of the publishing schedule team, who’d have to be generously on board for it or it wouldn’t work. He asked everyone who’d be working on the books. They all said enthusiastic yesses. The revelation of expertise, teamwork and galvanized spirit has been one of the most lovely and satisfying things about writing these books and bringing them to birth so succinctly—and frankly also so very beautifully—I very much love the U.S. editions too, but the U.K. editions are really something special in terms of design.

I started work on the first book, “Autumn,” at the end of 2015. 2016 brought the most unpredictable changes, all across the country here, then all across the Western world. It was another revelation to me of the way that the books we write choose their own time to come.

I couldn’t ever have planned this. But it’s right. The seasons are all about what changes and what, regardless of extreme change, stays the same. The novel is a revolutionary form too. It rolls forward, gathers its mosses.

Also, you can’t get away from the effect of global warming—let’s give it its real and alarming name—when you’re working with the seasons and watching the usual changes warp in real-time immediacy.

So the consciousness you’re asking about in your question—it’s not that I set out consciously in quite that way. But the writing of the books has been all about consciousness, about articulating what’s happening right now, in social and environmental terms and also increasingly in terms of the shifts and changes in the use of language in the public realm even just over the last couple of years, language, along with notions of time and social structure, being the physical material of any novel.

NHK: As I was reading “Spring,” I couldn’t help but see the 12-year-old protagonist Florence, who boldly enters spaces and scenarios many of her elders would not dare to in order to demand change, as a Greta Thunberg-like character. Why did you choose a child as a catalyst for change? Was Florence in some way modeled after the Swedish teen environmentalist who’s stood up to political leaders the world over? 

AS: “Spring” thieves some of its narrative from Shakespeare’s “Pericles.” Each of these novels has been as if befriended by one of Shakespeare’s late plays, the plays where, quite miraculously, he makes brand new form, one that always conjures impossible rebirth, out of a shredding and re-melding of elements of tragedy, history and comedy, the material of his earlier plays. (“Spring” is also befriended by a lot of other written and visual forms, but the workings of Shakespeare’s “Pericles” through it deliver the almost sardonic and quite blatantly impossible sense of hope.)

So Florence was already written, already a new drawn form of Shakespeare’s Marina, when I first encountered, in the news, in January this year, the brilliant shining Greta Thunberg speaking at Davos.

Marina is a child so good that Shakespeare can winkingly drop her feet first into the nastiest, seamiest of places and watch as she illuminates and scours clean those places. “Pericles” is about good and bad governance, how important the first is and how cataclysmic and catastrophic the latter—but above all it’s about an incorruptible goodness. Also, when you’re faced with what looks like an unshiftable dilemma, ask a child. Thunberg has articulated the future to us, because the future is hers and her generations’ inheritance. Her presence is the appearance on the world stage of the possible future—one of frankness and goodness and unselfishness up against the conglomerate business mindset that thinks right now that it owns and can use both us and the world. That’s the choice we face. As Thunberg says, the real power belongs to the people. I’m not surprised to see the whole world turn to listen. 

My Marina character, Florence, gets almost nothing changed. Yet what change she does achieve is downright impossible, unless we choose to change. Greta Thunberg is timely. She’s a threshold, a door open out of the dark.

NHZ: You carried out interviews with refugees and detainees at the United Kingdom Immigration Removal Centre for your latest novel. Are there stories you heard that impacted you but couldn’t quite make it onto the page in one form or another? 

AS: I had a great deal of help with information and knowledge I’d been trusted with by people who’ve been or are being illegally detained, and I also read and searched out what people who’ve been detained (the most invisible of people right now in the world, human beings rendered invisible by an industrialized system of detention) have been able to publish and voice against all the silencing odds about their time in detention. I also asked anonymous sources who work in the system to tell me about it as it is. But there’s more. There’s so much endlessly more, every day more. One man I spoke to, a man who’d been trafficked since the age of 4, and had arrived in the U.K. looking for help only to be trafficked again, until he’d escaped, and gone to the Home Office for help, and been arrested and incarcerated, said to me, “You have to tell people. People don’t know. They think it’s like the government tells them. You have to tell them what it’s like.“ So I have and I am.

NHZ: Some of the events you mention in your series, such as the Windrush scandal and London’s Grenfell Tower fire, are fresh out of the newspapers of the past several years. Is there ever a point when writing about contemporary events that it feels too recent to truly dissect or glean meaning from in writing? Or does the recentness help lend urgency to your work?

AS: The thing is, nothing’s really new. Windrush and Grenfell are just the latest age-old governmental selfishnesses. And one of the interesting things about the attempt at articulation of what’s happening around us right now is the sense of the metamorphic thing that can happen in the imaginative space the arts always create, personally, psychologically, socially, nationally, internationally, metaphysically—all these are of course umbilically connected. The novel genre frames reality, all our realities, brand new, ancient, in a way that asks of the imagination.

Also, I’m feeling well equipped—I’ve recently been rereading Muriel Spark; I reread everything she wrote last year around the centenary of her birth. Spark can write quite specifically about, say, Watergate, like she does in the novel called “The Abbess of Crewe,” and it can be about all the centuries of surveillance, powerplay and dodgy governmental dealings, as well as very much the specifics of a couple of years in the 1970s. Spark, merry about apocalypse, facing the 20th century’s own stormy times of rising fascism and emotional mass manipulation, always gestures toward the thinking mind, the reason we’ve a skull beneath the skin at all, as she might (given her great love of the metaphysical poets) have put it.

NHZ: While the series is set in a post-EU-Referendum U.K., I find it remarkable that you’re able to portray in detail the uncertainty of the moment without predicting what will come of the vote in terms of the U.K.’s as-of-yet undefined separation from the European Union. Do you have any predictions as to how Brexit will play out as a new autumn deadline looms and British politics remain in disarray? Do you have an ideal scenario in mind? 

AS: No. I think the current quite blatantly expedient political use of division and emotion locally and internationally has ripped a chasm and sown a neurosis and a reactive fury through almost everything—and was meant to. A small number of people have made a lot of money out of such volcanic political canyon-ing across the world.

But. We’ll sort it. We’re multifarious, and we’re astonishing. And division is a kind of lie to us, in our human multifacetedness. We won’t stand for it for long. I hope.

NHZ: There’s a layering of histories that occurs in “Spring.” For example, Culloden, the setting of the final brutal battle of the 1745 Jacobite rising, becomes the setting of a new, very different opportunity for a form of freedom. What did you hope your readers would come to understand about the time we live in with these collage-like moments?

AS: I didn’t set out to hope for anything, I just told it as it asked to be told and went with what the historic cycles provided.

But here’s an anecdote—I’d originally thought I’d maybe be writing this book partly about Switzerland, maybe based around the place where the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke and the great short story writer Katherine Mansfield (who grace the book fleetingly) had lived so close to one another one year in the 1920s without having ever met each other, and I’d planned a trip to see the place, Sierre, just for a couple of days. But then, on the morning before the day we were meant to leave, I put my head and shoulders inside a massive renaissance wooden chest that’s been in my partner’s family for something like four hundred years, it’s where we now keep the photo albums, I was in there looking for a photo of something I thought might be a help to the book, and that’s when history hit me hard on the head—the lid of the box came down and thumped me on the forehead and my forehead was too gashed open to allow air travel, so the planned Swiss trip was canceled. OK. We moved the dates. Then a dear friend died.  Her funeral was taking place on the new Swiss dates and there was no way we’d not be there at her service. At that service one of the pieces of music she’d chosen was a tune close to my heart, a tune called Highland Cathedral, a traditional Scottish bagpipe tune of great beauty.

With the closer-to-home mountains and sound of the Scottish highlands in my head, I sat on the floor in our front room a few days later and laughed out loud at how I’d sort of known all along that this book was meant to be set in the north of Scotland, which is a place that really feels, right now, like a quite different country is still possible, if we want it to be, both in the U.K. or out of it.

NHK: Despite the despair common in our times, and that several of your characters, such as Richard, experience, your novels still find ways to offer glimpses of radical hope. Where do you find reasons to be hopeful in today’s turbulent political and environmental context?

AS: We’re human. We’ll work it out. But we’d better get on to it. We have to move fast. Time—it’s not just of the essence. It is the essence.