Lyrical visions alternate with fables and farce, history with Covid, in the scheme-busting fifth part of Smith’s seasonal quartet
– another great lexical player – disapprovingly called a “quibble”. I’m sure she knows that “current” means “running” . So the proclaimed purpose of her four previous books was always going to be problematic. Four novels, named for the seasons of the year, were written fast and published even faster in an attempt to close the gap between experience and a writer’s response to it. But the trouble with writing about current events is that they keep running on ahead of you.
She cracks jokes, lots of them, some of rococo subtlety, some with the raucous rudeness of playground taunts. Her idiosyncratic, staccato fictions touch on modern preoccupations such as the climate crisis and migration and the pandemic, but they do so obliquely, through rainbow-creating prisms provided by history or by the author’s unusually acute sensitivity to craftsmanship and the beauty of material things – be that the curve of a curlew’s beak or the intricacy of the carving on a tombstone.
The narrator is quite like Ali Smith … But there’s not a shred of autofiction: Smith is too receptive to the world’s variety for thatone of Smith’s lead characters was a film-maker who wanted to shape his film as a series of postcards. Snapshots, glimpses and fragments of time were to be juxtaposed, setting up a jangle of echoes and dissonances and suggestive harmonies. Smith’s whole book sequence has been, similarly, a collage of bits and pieces, of loose ends plaited together.