Like Autumn, Winter and Spring, Summer, the final novel in Smith’s seasonal quartet, draws heavily on very current events. I saw her interviewed by Nicola Sturgeon at Edinburgh Book Festival two years ago, where she spoke about how she’d discovered that her publisher could get books into production really quickly, in something amazing like six weeks from writing to publishing, and that made her realise she could write about all the terrible things happening - Brexit, the refuge crisis, etc. - pretty much as they happened. So of course Summer is partially set in a world in lockdown, as well as bringing together the other concerns she raised in the previous novels. Summer also works to tie the previous books in the quartet together, reintroducing characters from those novels. I know there have already been non-fiction books on the pandemic, but Summer will probably be the first widely read fiction on the subject. It’s so current that George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent protests are mentioned. And Smith anticipates our discomfort by having a character, Daniel Gluck (who’s also in Autumn) discuss with an artist friend how nobody wanted a book about the Second World War right after it had ended. I was uncomfortable. The world is changing (mostly for the worse) on an hour by hour basis at the moment and reading fiction is generally an escape. But Summer also displayed the very best of what I love about Smith’s writing in her playfulness with language and grammar, her ability to make me laugh and cry, her very clear love for humanity. Summer will never be my favourite of the seasonal novels, because these have been particularly harrowing times, but I’m looking forward to reading the whole quartet again in 50 years or so and seeing how I feel about it all at a distance, because I know it’s been recorded accurately and with empathy.

Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet has been a proverbial literary light amongst a dark few years of global news and politics. Which is even more impressive when you consider that the series has been written in response to and about just that, with each book in the series focusing on different timely issues: the post-Brexit climate (Autumn), the world in the wake of Trump (Winter), Immigration Removal Centres and domestic border issues (Spring) and the Covid-19 lockdown (Summer). Smith includes various themes (each book takes inspiration from the plot of a Shakespeare play), numerous references to authors, art and artists, including a whole host of other motifs to bring together a wider story which has a serious message but is wholly exciting and unique to read.

After initially feeling a tiny bit disappointed with this final instalment - there were some meandering sections in the middle where I didn't really appreciate where it was all going - on reflection I've come to realise that it is a fitting conclusion. The present day sections were particularly memorable and striking. I'm sure I'd enjoy this even more on a re-read of the four books consecutively, which I plan to do at some point soon.

This is a wonderful book and it brings the quartet of books that began with Autumn to a close whilst also drawing together the characters and themes from the previous novels. I do wish that I had re-read the previous three before embarking on this one to refresh my memory of Daniel, Iris, Charlotte and others who reappear in this final novel.

The setting is absolutely contemporary opening in lockdown in Brighton. The theme of detention links with covid lockdown and parallels are drawn with Daniel's experience of internment as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man in the 1940s with the detention of immigrants and asylum seekers in the 21st century UK. Once again Smith gives a Shakespeare play as a background, this time The Winter's Tale, and introduces a forgotten woman artist, film maker Lorenza Mazzetti. In this way the cycle of the seasons are linked with the cycles of time - explored in this book through discussions of Einstein.

I can't do it justice, but highly recommend it.

Remarkable in many ways, this wraps up Ali Smith's seasonal quartet beautifully. Like its predecessors, it makes a virtue out of the speed in which it was written and its ability to address and respond to the early surreality and uncertainty of the pandemic shutdown. It also brings together the strands and characters of the previous books in surprising ways, as Lorenza Mazzetti and Einstein become as central to the narrative as other artists and figures are to the other books. It's not perfect - the speed of the writing leads to over-explication and preachiness at times and the Winter's Tale parallels seemed a little forced to me, but overall it's wonderful in so many ways. It's also great, and very funny, on sibling rivalry. As she puts it so well, reflecting our current uncertain situation while also making it more bearable: "And summer's surely really all about an imagined end. We head for it instinctually like it must mean something".

<i>Because summer isn’t just a merry tale. Because there’s no merry tale without the darkness. And summer’s surely really all about an imagined end.</i>

The triumphant conclusion of Ali Smith's seasonal quarter - or have we just imagined it's over?

<i>See him as he squats on Cromer beach doing sums, Charlie Chaplin with the brow of Shakespeare.</i>
'Einstein' by John Maynard Keynes, New Statesman and Nation (1933), and the epigraph to [book:Einstein on the Run: How Britain Saved the World’s Greatest Scientist|44174556]

Impressively it seems Smith may have planned all along that Einstein - described by Keynes as combining Shakespeare and Chaplin - would bring these two key figures from the quartet together, so much so that she concealed a deus-ex-machina in Winter such that ein stein (a stone) could also bring many of the key characters physically together in Summer. [Although one cannot mention Keynes and Einstein without noting the awful anti-semitism in Keynes's notes after meeting the great man in Berlin in 1926, and it is odd Smith doesn't pick this up]

Smith may also have planned all along that the series would end with Daniel recalling his time in an internment camp in the 1940s (it is first mentioned in Autumn and I believe she said after writing Winter than Summer would feature the 1940s) as an echo of present day immigration detainees (following the theme of Spring). But she can't possibly have known how that would also so neatly mirror the lockdown we'd all experience in 2020, bringing her signature blend of past and present to a brilliant conclusion. [Some references to Spanish flu do feel a little more forced.]

<i>Who am I then? What am I doing here? This is not my country or my home; I have no one left in the whole world, everybody’s dead</i>
Lorenza Mazzetti, Diario londinese - translation by Francesca Massarenti

A quote (not in the novel) from the female artist who features in Summer and one that in one sense could mirror the experience of the 104 year old Daniel Gluck still mourning the only two people he really loved, (the real-life) Pauline Boty and his sister Hannah, whose story, hinted at in Autumn, we learn in more detail here both from his perspective and things he could not have known.

And yet, wonderfully, the aforementioned stone actually leaves Daniel at the end of the novel living with his son and having met his sister's great grandson, who he mistakes for his sister.

<i>At the same time she’s made it clear to both that she’s not really available and can’t commit for longer; she’s told them about Gordon Stone, her longterm boyfriend at home.
(In reality there’s no home and there’s no such person. Gordonstoun is the name of a posh school in Scotland that her mother used to work at before she met her father. Prince Charles went there.)</i>

A missed opportunity. A rather out-of-context Smithian pun - but one that fails to mention the history of Gordonstoun: a school that started in the 1930s for both teachers and pupils who came to the UK as refugees from Nazi Germany, following the model of Beltane School in Wimbledon.

<i>Die Schule startete als Schule für Flüchtlingskinder und für aus Deutschland geflüchtete Lehrer, vergleichbar etwa der Beltane School in Wimbledon (London) oder Stoatley Rough School</i>
(German wikipedia)

That could have led to an exploration of Beltane School - founded by Ernst Bulova, another refugee from the Nazis in the 1930. But when the war began he was himself placed into internment by the British government, and later, like Einstein, left the UK for the US.

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/28/nyregion/ernst-bulova-98-founder-of-camp-with-a-free-spirit.html

Beltane School was in turn turned into an internment camp used after the war for some Nazi prisoners but also, incredibly in the same camp, for holocaust survivors: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/nicholas-hammer-37370.html

The omission of this fascinating story is a shame as it would have provided another Wimbledon link for my bingo card, which I've consequently had to amend (postcards have also gone). But for those keen to play along - here it is: https://i.ibb.co/ynbkn49/smith.png

<i>Millions and millions, all across the country and all across the world, saw the lying, and the mistreatments of people and the planet, and were vocal about it, on marches, in protests, by writing, by voting, by talking, by activism, on the radio, on TV, via social media, tweet after tweet, page after page.</i>

Overall - a very neat conclusion to the quartet.

My own reservation is that although the political campaigning of the novel is admirable in many respects, it does have the one-sided bubble nature of social media ("tweet after tweet"), including some unpleasant abuse of the prime minister and his chief adviser, which is, I believe, more part of the problem than part of the solution to our current divides, so 4 stars.

The fourth book in an incredible quartet which I believe should be treated as a single work of art rather than four individual books. I've written a longer review on Goodreads where I've tried to illustrate that I think the first three books teach us about community (Autumn), individuals (Winter) and countries (Spring), which Summer then goes on to tell us all need to work together to allow us to move forward.

A beautiful book, but one which needs to be read in conjunction with with its three counterparts. When you do this, it is a remarkable achievement. See my review here for more detail:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3153628812

3 1/2 stars.

I liked this much better than “Winter” and “Spring.” I realised several important things while reading this book (somewhat stupidly). This… is not four stand-alone novels, it's ONE big novel. What I REALLY should have done was just wait for “Summer” to be published, and THEN read all four of them. That… was a mistake.

Another important thing I realised: in my opinion, this is less of a “novel” than it is a performance. Or a painting, or a photograph. Think Jack Kerouac on his typewriter, clacking away. Maybe I will feel differently in five years. But for now, what these novel(s) purport to be is to capture what it’s like to be alive, now. A now that always fades. As a result, the novel(s) often read like a Bingo game of What’s Happened Recently (in “Autumn,” it was Brexit; in “Winter,” it was Trump; in “Spring,” I think it was border detainments of children?, and here in “Summer,” it’s the virus).

A third important thing I realised: taking the time to review what happened in previous books before reading this one made a HUGE difference. With “Winter” and “Spring,” I just plunged right in. If I hadn't reviewed what happened before, I WOULD HAVE BEEN REALLY CONFUSED ABOUT WHO WAS WHO AND WHAT WAS HAPPENING. So, I HIGHLY recommend doing this. I now think there was probably a lot of stuff that I missed in "W" and "S".

At her best, Ali Smith is incredibly moving to me, with her sincere, Joni Mitchell-esque raw heart-on-her-sleeve passion and enthusiasm for trees, birds, fields, Dickens, obscure artists and filmmakers. At her worst, she reads like preachy YA - cringey and didactic. There is literally a sentence in this, spoken by a teenager girl, that is along the lines of “my already trampled on generation will be evermore resilient.” It’s unfair to nitpick sentences from a book (and maybe this is arguably the voice of the CHARACTER?), but… I just hate feeling like I’m being given a bunch of ‘statements’ about how shit Boris Johnson is. That just doesn’t read like literature to me.

I thought a lot about Eudora Welty’s essay “Must the Novelist Crusade?” while reading this. I’ll have to go back to the Welty essay to remember her argument, but basically, I hate the parts in this where I feel like Smith is crusading, or lecturing. I like being able to figure things out for myself.

The main theme I took away from “Summer” as a novel was the idea of engagement in art – what are the different ways that art can try to engage with issues in ‘the real world’? This is captured most memorably in the section set in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutchinson_Internment_Camp">detention camp</a>on the Isle of Man, where tons of German and/or British-German intellectuals and dada artists were detained. It was SO interesting to read about this and I’m glad I took the time to google certain names, to see if they were real people (they were - Fred Uhlman and Kurt Schwitters). I really LIKEd being able to SEE FOR MYSELF the parallel between this and now!

As always in Ali Smith, we have:
- Puns (David Copy-field, bee drone vs. machine drone, internet vs. internment).
- Obscure women artists (I always enjoy these sections!)
- Historical figures (Einstein, Chaplin)
- Nature (swifts)
- Current Events (Greta Thurnberg, Australia fires, internet harassment and, of course, the virus)

Themes include:
- The power of language (the passage where Smith delves into the roots of the word letter, up to Boris Johnson comparing Muslim women to letterboxes, is very interesting. I like this kind of writing so much more than Iris' rants, which I just skimmed).
- Time
- History; change
- Old people and young people (the 104 year old character in this book is only 2 years older than MY grandmother…!).
- The role and playfulness of art - I like the idea of how <i>“the artwork [must outartist the artist.”</i>

Overall, I approached this very reluctantly, but finished it feeling on the whole quite pleased. The passage near the end, of Grace in the field by the church, is REALLY strong. I’ve criticised fans of Ishiguro and David Mitchell for being whiny little bitches who keep saying they “waaah I like their old stuff” better, and basically… I have to stop being a whiny little bitch myself! I gotta let it go.

Ultimately, I liked the novel. This is a project I will need to revisit in a few years so that I can properly sort out my thoughts about it. But there is definitely some strong stuff here.

<i>“Goodness is more like a turnip! … foulness just wants one thing, more of its self. It wants self self nothing but self over and over again."</i>

My thanks to Hamish Hamilton for the ARC via NetGalley.

Ali Smith has hit the target again with her insightful writing. Her prose is almost poetic and her stories are not to be rushed, instead they are to be read slowly and every perfectly crafted sentence appreciated fully. This series of seasonal books are a perfect time capsule as her observations of the current time period capture life perfectly. They will be as fascinating to read in years to come as they are now.

Summer uses the characters of Autumn and Winter to explore the themes of Spring, through a new shared experience for us all.

A great way to wrap up a great literary project.

This book will I think delight fans of Autumn and Winter in particular by continuing the story of so many key (and some less key) characters.

We learn for example:

Why Sophia hid that stone under the shoes in her wardrobe and (although this may be a stretch - how by doing so she saved Daniel’s life).

What inspired the lyrics of the one-hit wonder Daniel penned (the copyright fees for which, sourced by Elisabeth) paid his nursing home fees.

Who lead Daniel to his love for Chaplin

How Einstein visited Cromer; how not being Einstein saved a future filmmaker's life - and how ein stein both reunites a mother and a baby, and a father and his son.

How a graphologist foretold Daniel’s key role across the whole quartet - with lover and child in Winter, lover and father of neighbour in Spring, and (I think) sister’s great grandchildren in Summer.

Simply wonderful. See my Goodreads review (under Gumble's Yard) for so much more on the links between this and the rest of this unforgettable quartet.