What a truly beautiful book. An angry, blistering, beautiful book.

I will admit, I'm taking these books in the wrong order. I'm starting with Spring rather than Autumn. Maybe that's wrong - I mean, even the prime events of this novel take place in autumn. Like any good crop, the seeds are planted in October, and the results not seen until Spring. Maybe big brave results like embarking on a new project. Maybe they're smaller, and a bit more internal, like starting to question the job in which you've been indoctrinated. And as with any good cyclical story, the ending really doesn't feel like the end. And Spring (the season) isn't always good. Katherine Mansfield is dying of tuberculosis in April, Rainer Rilke dies after pricking his finger on a rose.

The book does seethe and shout too, bringing the plight of immigrants and refugees unapologetically right to the fore. The 'we want you' passage, lambasting those companies that collect and harvest your data, is spectacular. Make no mistake, this is a political book. Ultimately, they take what is rather a small intimate plot, and spin it out into something much bigger.

The characters were nicely formed, even if Florence is left a bit nebulous (which I suppose she is meant to be). However, I have a true soft spot for Paddy - Smith is able to imbue her with such life and personality and love, which is what makes Richard's experience so much more believable. Britt and her language occasionally jarred, but flashes of the girl she used to be come through, telling their own story of lost potential.

This is a wonderful book, one about humanity, that should be read by everyone.

Thank you Penguin and Netgalley for a free copy of this book.

I’m really not sure how to review this book!
It’s not what I expected at all.
I read them out of sequence (reading them in the sequence I picked them up instead of the planned sequence). So I felt that I wasn’t getting as much out of them as I should.
I also had a strong feeling of ‘I’m not sure what I think of this book’ when reading it. That was on my mind more than the contents of the book - which is not a great sign when reading!
So I’m sorry - this is a nebulous review for a nebulous read!

Thank you to Penguin and Netgalley for an ARC in return for an honest review.

Really interesting idea for a state-of-the-nation novel done in Ali Smith style. Thought provoking and intriguing. Almost unsettling to see a version of reality mirrored back at you.

"I shall be glad though when Spring comes. Winter is a difficult time."
A letter in 1922 from Katherine Mansfield to "L.M." (Lesley Moore, her nickname for Ida Baker, her companion and confidant)

Spring is the brilliant 3rd instalment of Ali Smith's seasonal quartet and comes with the usual beautiful wrapper on the cover featuring a picture from David Hockney's The Arrival of Spring.

"Mess up my climate, I’ll fuck with your lives. Your lives are a nothing to me. I’ll yank daffodils out of the ground in December. I’ll block up your front door in April with snow and blow down the tree so it cracks your roof open. I’ll carpet your house with the river.

But I’ll be the reason your own sap’s reviving. I’ll mainline the light to your veins."

After a trademark Smith prelude about the state of 2019 politics (including the death and rape threats to female MPs), the first strand of the novel opens in October 2018 with a film and TV producer, Richard Lease, sitting in a deserted Scottish rural railway station, having decided to to walk away from his office and travel from London Kings X to Inverness, "the furthest a train from here to go":

"Why is he here?
That's the wrong kind of question. It implies there's a story. There is no story. He's had it with story. He's removing himself from story, more specifically from story concerning: Katherine Mansfield, Rainer Maria Rilke, a homeless woman he saw yesterday morning on a pavement outside the British library, and over and above all, the death of his friend."

The 'death of his friend' refers to a long-term collaborator, lover and intellectual soulmate, the script writer, Paddy Heal (he later discovers she is née Patricia Hardiman), mother of two twins - 'the twin', and 'the other twin' - and in a recent-past section of the novel (Spring 2018) dying of cancer. The novel also takes us to the 1970s when they first met, when she instantly gives him the name Doubledick which he optimistically hopes is sexual innuendo but actually a reference to the Dickens's The Story of Richard Doubledick.

We also learn that Lease's wife disappeared from his life in February 1987, taking his 2 year old daughter with her and throughout the novel Richard maintains a dialogue with his 'imaginary daughter', the person he thinks she may have grew up to be, continuing a suggestion made by Paddy that he visits places, e.g. galleries, to which he might have taken his daughter.

In one such gallery he encounters the work of Tacita Dean, including her stunning The Montafon Letter ( https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/magazine-tacita-dean) and she is the novel's foundation female artist, albeit here her work rather than her life is key. A view of the Highland mountains that recalled Dean’s art is what prompted Richard to get off the train at that particular station, rather than travel all the way to Inverness.

The dying Paddy and Richard discuss a project on which he has been asked to work with a rather less skilled writer, Martin T(w)erp, based on a novel April by Bella Powell: "literary, he says. Second novel by Nella, something, Bella. A lot of language. Not much happens."

This (fictitious) novel is based on the real-life coincidence of Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke both being in possibly the same hotel in Switzerland in 1922, unknown to each other. 1922 is of course, as Paddy proclaims, famous as the: "Year when anything in literature fractured. Fell to pieces. On Margate Sands." the last a reference to TS Eliot's The Wasteland.

But Smith chooses to focus on the 'outliers' of the modernist revolution, Mansfield and Rilke:

"The stories Mansfield wrote in Switzerland were her best. And him, about to finish the Elegies, write the Orpheus poems ... the seminal remakers of forms they were using. There, in the same room, at the same time.

And what they write, it changes everything. They break the mould. They're the modern. The likes of Zola and Dickens pass the baton to Mansfield and Rilke, the two great homeless writers, the great outliers."

Mansfield's letters play an important role. The one that opens my review is not quoted in the novel, but a line from another forms one of the novel's epigraph, a letter found unsent in her blotter on her death in January 1923 and assumed to be written days before: "I am looking for signs of spring already." Her words are consciously echoed by the dying Paddy to Richard "The simple flowers of our spring are what I want to see again, she says." Both fail to live long enough to fulfil their goal, Paddy dying in August 2019. And Richard himself has an erotic dream inspired, bizarrely, by another letter from Mansfield, this one to William Gerhardi, an aspiring author.

1922 is also when Michael Collins was killed, and Paddy/Smith point out the obvious parallels of the political developments of the time to Spring 2019, with the Brexit deal mired in the Irish border backstop:

"Ireland in uproar. Brand new union. Brand new border. Brand new ancient Irish civil unrest. Don't tell me this isn't relevant."

One of Paddy and Richard's most successful collaborations was on a film called Andy Hoffnung, the title coming from a comic misunderstanding when a stranger sitting next to Paddy at a Beethoven concern seemed to utter those words, which she assumed was his name, but which was actually a reference to the piece An Die Hoffnung.

Those words of course have echoes of Pericles motto in the Shakespeare play - a key foundation text for the novel, and also quoted in the epigraph:

"He seems to be a stranger; but his present is
A withered branch that’s only green at top,
The motto: In hac spe vivo."

Paddy never does find the stranger's name - but retains a lifelong love of Charlie Chaplin inspired by his enthusiastic advocacy when they go for a drink afterwards. But the reader recognises him ... as Daniel Gluck from Autumn and Winter.

The above narrative gradually explains Richard's opening remarks, his despair a combination of an absent daughter, a dead soul-mate and lover, and indeed T(w)erp’s proposed treatment of April that turns Mansfield and Rilke's (lack of an) encounter and its artistic significance into a tawdry TV bonkbuster.

The second strand of the novel starts around the same time with Brittany (abbreviated to Brit) Hall, an employee of the ubiquitous SA4A, working as an detainee custody officer in a (needlessly) high-security Immigration Removal Centre:

"I’m a DCO at one of the IRCs employed by the private security firm SA4A who on behalf of the HO run the Spring, the Field, the Worth, the Valley, the Oak, the Berry, the Garland, the Grove, the Meander, the Wood and one or two others too, she said."

We also meet Brit's rather dotty mother, although wedded not to junk TV (as in the equivalent characters in Autumn and Winter, although we do later get some The Apprentice bashing) but now, in a reflection of the times, to the 24-hour news channel: "I wonder what will happen now", her constant refrain as she watches the unfolding developments, entranced.

The Centre is visited by a mysterious 12 year-old girl Florence, of non British descent indeed possibly the daughter of an immigrant held there. She is verbally eloquent, intellectually precocious and mysteriously able to bend others, Derren Brown style, to her will - a sort of cross between Elisabeth from Autumn and Lux from Winter. An odd rumour has it that she was able to walk into a seedy and dangerous brothel and persuade the male customers of the error of their ways, giving us another clue that the foundational Shakespeare play here is Pericles, this episode echoing Marina's time in the brothel in Mytilene. Another clue is the motto on her school blazer - Vivunt Spe.

More relevantly for the plot, she has a similarly transformative effect when she somehow makes it to the office of the director of the Wood, embarrassing him into at least having the facility thoroughly cleaned, after asking him a series of pointed questions:

"I am a twelve year old girl asking you questions ... I am way old enough to read and comprehend books and things published on the net, and I’ve been reading up a lot about these things partly because they touch my life personally but also because I am curious about them anyway, and some of the things I’ve read made me want to ask some questions to the people responsible, and you are one of those people."

On a personal note , I am going to hope or pretend that passage may have been inspired by an encounter, when my 9 year-old daughter asked Ali Smith how Autumn would have differed had the UK voted Remain.

Magically Florences persuades Brit, against her will and political instinct, to team up with her - Florence and the Machine - and travel with her to Scotland, as she is, like Richard, mysterious drawn to Kingussie station, in her case prompted by a postcard. Postcards also play a rather key role in the plot - as indeed they did in the writing careers of Mansfield and Rilke. The postcards this time don't include a print of Boubat's Girl in Leaf Dress (the key link between Autumn and Winter) but that does get an implicit mention in a comment on refugees: "Children with clothes as ragged as suits of old leaves."

Kingussie is known for the MacKenzie Fountain (https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/5435924). Outside there is a humourous encounter reminiscent of the Post Office photo saga, but this time with a coffee van run by the town librarian Alda Lyons (which turns out to be a pseudonym based on Auld Alliance and inspired by the Andy Hoffnung film). The coffee and lemonade van appears to have neither beverage nor indeed anything else: an echo of the over-catchy Duck Song except here it's the lemonade stall owner who is infuriating (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwO21W9AD3w).

And the four embark on a road trip to Inverness and Culloden together, which enables Smith/Lyons to educate us about the enclosure of the common lands and the almost ethnic cleansing of the Highland Clearances in the aftermath of Culloden.

It wouldn't be a Smith novel without interspersed present day politics although Trump, and his fellows, are mentioned but largely off-screen, quite deliberately so as Richard refuses to speak of them: "never do anything a demagogue narcissist might long for us to do."

And indeed there is an underlying sense of optimism - this too shall pass, Spring arriving after Winter, that these disruptive figures will ultimately go the way of all flesh: "It’ll melt away, like snow in May."

The end of the novel jumps back and forth between October 2018 and spring 2019, although without attempting to forecast how Brexit might have gone. The Pericles link might hint that Florence may prove to be Richard's long lost daughter, but the ages doesn't match up - his daughter would be in her mid 30s. Another clue to her identity - her first name is Elisabeth and she, using her mother's maiden name, has an unusual surname ... she may well have been hiding in plain sight (to the reader at least), but in another season, all along.

Pleasingly a full house on my Ali Smith bingo card: see https://i.ibb.co/Wy770gx/spring-bingo.png

albeit with a stretch for the compulsory Wimbledon link. I could claim the Smith-Sumi encounter above, or perhaps that another of Mansfield's letter inspired the title of this poem:
http://poems.poetrysociety.org.uk/poems/this-is-not-a-letter-but-my-arms-around-you-for-a-brief-moment/

"nearly made blueprints, nearly built a whole
world, all churches and cafes like in
Wimbledon Village, like we always dreamed.
we always dreamed, but i couldn’t do it alone."

5 stars for another wonderful novel - I can't wait for Summer 2020.

Ali Smith has written a serious of novels that examine the problems of our times - climate change, Brexit and the rise of far right nationalism and the resulting rise in intolerance and racism. Ali Smith picks up on the latest news to give us the state of Britain through everyday people. The third novel in the brilliant seasonal quartet is Spring a time for renewal perhaps a time for hope.

From the start of this novel you feel the anger as Ali Smith takes aim at lying politicians, newspapers that drip feed their readers with xenophobic rhetoric ‘we don’t want facts - we want people in power saying the truth is not the truth’. The novel is about the state of our nation but it concentrates on our treatment of migrants. Escaping poverty and tyranny they arrive in a country where the government has proudly announced a ‘hostile environment’ for migrants. Some parts of the press constantly using negative headlines to dehumanise migrants which aids the government with their plans to incarcerate them in Immigration Removal Centres. The scandal of Windrush makes it all too clear where we end up with a ‘hostile environment’.

The novel concentrates on the lives of Richard and Brittany. Richard is a hollow man - deep depression following the death of his friend Paddy. Not allowed to read at the funeral he gets on a train and travels as far away as he can to Scotland.
In a separate strand of the story Brittany works in a Immigration Removal Centre who also ends up on a train to Scotland with Florence a young ‘invisible’ migrant.

This book shines a light on the many injustices and offers hope of change.
Essential reading and now it’s time for Summer to complete the quartet.

Spring is my favourite season because it is renewal and full of promise. It might arrive with a bang or a whimper or a gentle warm embrace. This third of the seasons quartet examines the state of Britain in 2018 and it’s not a pretty picture. However, Ali Smith tries to give it a human face either via the past or the present and reminds us that after the bleak darkness of winter there is the hope of spring. There are two narratives which initially don’t seem to coincide. There’s Richard, an elderly television director who is grieving the loss of his best friend Patricia, known as Paddy. It’s Autumn, he’s aimless, feels he has lost his anchor and boards a train to Scotland, destination anywhere. Then there’s Brittany Hall who works for SA4A at a Detention Centre for migrants. On her way to work she meets young Florence who entices her to make a spontaneous journey north. These characters eventually meet at Kingussie and make important decisions. Along the way the story is interjected with legends and the works of artists and writers such as Katherine Mansfield and poet Rainer Rilke, the latter I especially like. Through the book Ali Smith covers topics like the treatment of detainees and how the system seems stacked against them, racism, borders, climate change, social media and Brexit. . The author does not tell us what the solutions are and at times she does not hold back and just lets rip.

The characters are interesting but my standout is Florence. Some of her conversations with people she meets are bizarre but they are clever and sometimes funny. On the journey north, she and Brit have fascinating conversations while others in the carriage are glued to their screens. Point taken. To me Florence is an allegory for spring as at times she’s invisible to people but she’s there just as the season is beneath the surface. It also struck me as remarkable and often a truism that a twelve year old can look at something, see right into the heart of it and turn perceived wisdom on its head. I rest my case with Greta Thunberg!

However, I did not enjoy this season as much as Autumn which remains my favourite. At times this one rambles and lacks cohesion in my opinion and I get lost in the thread and fail to see where it’s going. Then it re-finds me and gets going again. It is though extremely well written and very creative.

Overall, this is a powerful meltdown about the division and state of politics and other issues in 2018 Britain. It ends with the promise of hope and a reawakening as with the season of spring. Good job she didn’t write about 2020 as spring brought Covid19!

3-4 stars rounded up because it’s very well written.

With thanks to NetGalley and Penguin General UK for a copy of the book.

The third of Ali’s Smith’s seasonal quartet after Autumn and Winter.

Interestingly at one point, Richard remembers speaking in the past to his (then) future wife, who is crying over the end of Spring
And if you die before me, he says, I will spend all the time I’m alive and not with you negotiating the various time differences across the world so that I can spend as much time as a man possibly can on this planet in springtime’

I found this quote interesting - and somewhat ironical for two reasons: on a personal level, in that I contrived, as noted above, when reading this book to negotiate time differences to escape the onset of Spring and instead spend time in Autumn; On a general level, because in 2018 as covered in Spring, Richard is alive and not with his wife - however rather than him finding her there, we as the reader realise she is in fact hiding in the pages of Autumn as Wendy Demand.
SA4A

All of the books feature the firm SA4A (Smith, Ali, Quartet, Autumn) which has served as a symbol of the threat of faceless and almost unknown multinationals. In Autumn, we see SA4A as a quasi-police private security firm, in Winter Art works for their entertainments division to enforce copyright on emerging artists. In Spring book Britanny works for them at a UK Immigration Removal Centre.

But that is far from the only element linking the books. These are common elements I have spotted.

Cover Artwork

A wrap around cover featuring a David Hockney picture of a seasonal tunnel of trees: respectively: Autumn - “Early November Tunnel”, Winter - “Winter Tunnel with Snow” and Spring“Late Spring Tunnel”

Endpaper artwork

Endpaper artwork by a key female artist featured in the book: Autumn - Pauline Boty’s “The Only Blonde in the World”; Winter - Barbara Hepworth “Winter Solstice” and Spring - Tacita Dean’s “Why Cloud”

Past Decades

A concentration on the modern day resonances of a historic 20th Century decade: Autumn - 1960s, Winter - 1980s, Spring - 1920s. Summer will I believe feature the 1940s.

Note that the 1920s link for Spring is related to Katherine Mansfield (who seems to function as a second female artist here alongside Tacita Dean - the two together forming more of the role played by a single artist in the two previous books)

Contemporary events

Of course the key idea of the Quartet is the coverage of immediately contemporary events woven through the text - but each book has a concentration on key overarching themes: Autumn - the Brexit vote, Winter - Trump's election, Spring - the issue of borders (both the Irish border and those erected to deter migrations)

A link between past political actions from the crucial decade and contemporary events

This was a crucial part of the concept of seasonality that Smith set out to explore when she commenced the quartet
the concept that our real energy, our real history, is cyclic in continuance and at core, rather than consecutive and how closely to contemporaneousness a finished book might be able to be in the world, and yet how it could also be, all through, very much about stratified, cyclic time


In Autumn very deliberate parallels are drawn between the Profumo scandal and the Brexit vote – the concept of the lies of those in power. 

In Winter, the environmental and climate-change activism of Charlotte (Art’s ex-girlfriend) and the refugee involvement of the modern day Iris are linked directly to the Silent-Spring inspired environmental activism of the commune where Iris lives many years before and her role in the Greenham Common protests.

In Spring the Irish border complications to the Brexit issue are linked to the death of Michael Collins in 1922. 

Think about it .. Ireland in uproar. Brand new union. Brand new border. Brand new ancient Irish unrest. Don’t tell me this isn’t relevant all over again in its brand new same old way.


Tragic death

A female artist who died tragically (Autumn - Boty of cancer, Winter - Hepworth of a fire in her studio, Spring - Mansfield of TB) : that death being important to Paddy persuading Richard to reject the play he is being asked to Direct due to its historical inaccuracy.

Collections

A male character with a past link to that artist or who collected that art:Autumn Daniel's close relation to Pauline Boty (albeit he actually owns and just before the book, then sells a Hepworth); Winter - Art’s father (who of course is Daniel)'s love of Barbara Hepworth; Spring - the Collected works of Katherine Mansfield which Paddy leaves Richard in her will. 

Art influencing characters

Actual works of art of the artist figuring in the book and sparking a character’s imagination: In Autumn Elisabeth looks at a book of Boty’s paintings; in Winter Art’s mother views a Hepworth sculpture (I believe “Nesting Stones”) owned by his father; in Spring Richard visits a gallery to view Dean’s work. 

The influence of the art as a metaphor for the Quartet

The character’s reaction to the art serving as a very deliberate metaphor for what Smith is trying to do in her quartet. 

In Autumn, Elisabeth comments on one of Boty’s paintings
The cow parsley. The painted flowers. Boty’s sheer unadulterated reds in the re-image-ing of the image. Put it together and what have you got? Anything useful?


Which echoes a question Smith asked of herself in an interview as she started work on the concept
We'll see what happens. I have no idea how the reality will meet the conception. I'm looking forward to finding out


In Winter, Sophia comments of the Hepworth sculpture
It makes you walk around it, it makes you look through it from different sides, see different things from different positions. It’s also like seeing inside and outside something at once


which is a perfect metaphor for how Smith's writing forces us to examine our world

In Spring, Richard experiences something of an epiphany viewing Tacita Dean’s cloud pictures:
They’d made space to breathe possible, up against something breathtaking. After them, the real clouds above London looked different, like they were something you could read as breathing space. This made something happen too to the buildings below them, the traffic, the ways in which people were passing each other in the street, all of it part of a structure that didn’t know it was a structure, but was one all the same.


Again this seems a metaphor for the more hopeful elements emerging in Smith’s Spring - trying to gives us space away from the clouds which seem to be oppressing our society and help us to see the bigger picture and our fundamental interconnectedness.

Time Containers

When discussing the quartet, Smith commented
But we're time-containers, we hold all our diachrony, our pasts and our futures (and also the pasts and futures of all the people who made us and who in turn we'll help to make) in every one of our consecutive moments / minutes / days / years


In Autumn this concept was captured particularly in Daniel’s dreams and his memories of his fleeing from Nazi Germany and of his brilliant sister killed in the holocaust. 

In Winter the concept is even more explicit when discussing Art’s visions of the floating coastline, Lux explains what she calls her own coastline.

In Spring the idea is I think best captured in the almost interminable 11.29 on the railway platform in Kingussie as Richard reflects on much of his life
Is a single minute really this long. Is the clock that’s broken the one inside him


Rhythmic chapters

An rhythmical chapter, clearly designed to be read aloud: Autumn - the famous “All across the country …” chapter which Smith seemed to use in most of her readings; Winter the opening “ ….. is dead” chapter; Spring has two We Want ..” chapters (one opening and the other voiced by technology giants)

Shakespeare

A key link to a main Shakespeare plays (as well as an opening and seasonally linked Shakespearean Epigraphs and links to other plays).

The main plays are all one of Shakespeare's late romances: Autumn - The Tempest, Winter Cymbeline, Spring – Pericles. Summer will therefore feature - The Winter's Tale.

Dickens

A key link to a Dickens work: Autumn – A Tale of Two Cities, Winter – A Christmas Carol; Spring - The Story of Richard Doubledick

Dickens Opening Lines

Autumn starts: "It was the worst of times, it was the worst of time"
A Tale of Two Cities starts "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"

Winter starts "God was dead: to begin with"
A Christmas Carol starts: "Marley was dead, to begin with"

Spring starts "Now what we don't want is facts"
Hard Times starts "NOW, what I want is, Facts"

TV relationships

Set alongside the literary references, relationships with TV stars from older years: In Autumn Wendy participates in a game show and forms a relationship with her minor celebrity participant (a former child TV star); in Winter Art’s step-father was a sitcom star; In Spring Richard, is an ex- Play for Today Director for TV and meets Paddy, his muse, confidant, closest friend and one-time (actually make that a double - two-time) lover through their collaboration as Director and writer.

Reappearing, related characters

Daniel Gluck, one of the two key characters of Autumn reappears as an earlier lover of a character in subsequent books - Sophie in Winter and Paddy in Spring - albeit with a different name in the latter (mistakenly identified as Andy).

And, as hinted above, we see in Spring the other main character of Autumn emerging as Richard's daughter.

Dysfunctional parent/child relationships

In Autumn - Elisabeth and her mother (as well as her missing father, whose identity we only find out in Spring. In Winter not just Art and Sophia, but between Sophia and her own father. In Spring Richard and his missing daughter

A Love of and interest in Charlie Chaplin
Both his work and his own life, introduced in each book by Daniel but then passed on in turn to other characters by those who Daniel infused with his love for Chaplin

Trees as a recurring image throughout the book

A delight in wordplay and punning

Note that play is a fundamental concept to Ali Smith. She remarked at a book event at Foyles that it is important that dramas are called plays, that playfulness and imagination are fundamental to her world view, and that she once heard a comment (which she found very true) that if you watch a group of young animals (for example kittens), if one of the them is not playing it probably is a sign that the animal will not survive for long.

Character’s names which form part of that punning

Art in Winter being matched by Brit in Spring, as well as Florence and her interaction with the immigration Machine (with perhaps Elisabeth’s surname Demand being the Autumn equivalent)

Non-native punners

A character who delights in wordplay and expanding other character’s appreciation of language, ironically (but presumably very deliberately given the immigration and Brexit ideas running through the books) in each cases a non-native English speaker.

In Autumn, Daniel broadens the language of the young Elisabeth; in Winter Lux has a great grasp of English language and literature and her own name serves as a pun at one stage Lux/Lexiography; In Spring the character is Florence. 


The importance of postcards

A postcard from Daniel to Sophie forms a key link between Autumn and Winter: In Spring postcards form a link between Richard and Paddy (and his imaginary daughter) and feature in the stories of Mansfield and Rilke as retold by Paddy.

In Richard’s letter to the screenwriter Terp (a failed attempt to dissuade Terp from adapting the gentle, literary novel “April” about the near meeting of Mansfield and Rilke in Switzerland in 1922, into a preposterous bonk-buster, he proposes changing the script to a series of postcards, observing ”Our lives .. often have what we might call a postcard nature”

Eduardo Boubat

An early reference (within the first ten pages) to Eduardo Boubat’s “petite fille aux feuilles mortes jardin du Luxembourg Paris 1946.

In Autumn Daniel remembers the postcard of it that he bought in Paris in the 1980s.

In Winter, Sophie - the recipient we later realise of the postcard is reminded of the postcard by the disembodied head she starts seeing

In Spring, a disembodied voice (perhaps taken, as we later realise is much of the book, from Florence’s Hot Air book) says “I’m the child who’s been buried in leaves” with a later reference to “children with clothes as ragged as suits of old leaves”.

The symbolism of fences and commons

The image that Ali Smith first thought of when she envisaged the Seasonal quartet was a fence - and as commented in my opening remarks the key for Ali Smith throughout this quartet was to emphasise that "nothing is not connected" and that "division is a lie"

In Autumn Elisabeth’s mother is shocked by a fence erected on a common near her home (the fence serving a metaphor for Brexit); In Winter Iris chains herself to a fence at the very start of the Greenham Commons protests. In Spring the fences are in the Immigration centre and the replacement of the commons by enclosures was the first stage of the Highland clearances which feature in the novel.

Smith's "Seasonal" quartet began with Autumn (published in October 2016), with Spring making up the third installment. Summer will be published later this year, and even Smith couldn't have foreseen quite how our world would have changed in these last 4 years or so since she embarked on this fantastic literary endeavour.

While the books can be read as standalone pieces I'd venture that they're best appreciated when read in order, as then the themes and ideas will become clearer to the reader this way. These books are smart and political and contain a lot of ideas in not so many pages, but are still accessible on various levels and incredibly readable, even funny at times.

That said, Spring is probably the darkest of the series so far - set in an Immigration Removal Centre and a modern rewriting of one of Shakespeare's lesser known plays, Pericles, this doesn't sound like it should work; but somehow Smith has managed to capture the zeitgeist of the late 2010s in a way nobody else has quite managed, and I'm pleased to say that this quartet gets better with each book. Highly recommended!

Despite so many friends 5-starring this and the earlier books in the quartet, it's just confirmation that Smith and I are not a match. I love her politics and her set piece monologues on the 'politics of stupidity' and big data are spot on, if not as zeitgeisty now as when this book first came out. I also loved Paddy for the brief pages when she's there. But the rest... not really.

It's like topics are just thrown in randomly: Katherine Mansfield, Rilke, clouds, postcards, boring Richard, the lost daughter, migrant centres, time standing still on a train platform, puerile TV dramas (actually, that was pretty amusing!), a girl called Brit (get it?) - being kind we might call this a 'collage'; more unkindly, a chaotic jumble. Smith's trademark wordplay is a bit of a one-trick pony and for every hit, there are a handful of misses.

For whatever reason I just don't gel as a reader with Smith - but mine is a minority view and many people love her so best read other reviews to balance this one.