JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Spring
by Ali Smith

Suddenly I realized I had not read Spring, which has been sitting on a shelf for two years. How could this happen? My excuse is that I do not regard Ali Smith’s book as narratives but as adventures, so I save them for when I really need them (like now). When I read her books I have no idea what I’m getting into. The author trusts that I don’t need a road map—I jump in, and as I hurtle down (or up, I can’t tell) I am assailed by sights, sounds, wordplay, puns, feelings, colors, jokes, memories of things that never happened to me, so that by the time I get to the bottom (or top), I know I have been through an experience. One I cannot simply summarize it in words. If people want to know what it is they will have to read it for themselves, and they will thank me for telling them nothing.

So all the books by Ali Smith sitting on the shelf (alongside the books of her friend Kate Atkinson) merge in my memory like an art exhibit. (Note: Her novel How To Be Both comes in two sections which may be read in either order.) I retain details: the one with the artist of the cinquecento, the guy who won’t come out of the bathroom like the guests in Buñuels’ Exterminating Angel, etc. Spring is the third in Smith’s Seasonal Quartet—she’s dropped a new novel every year since 2016, and the series is unconnected but related by politics and the events of this bonkers world. How bonkers? The covid pandemic is just the latest in the series of unthinkables that have come to pass, and her punishing publication schedule allowed her to write it into the final book, Summer. I had thought the quartet was triggered by Brexit, but in an interview she said she started writing the books even before that—she is not just prolific, but clairvoyant.

Though the subjects of the Seasonal Quartet are bleak, sad, scary, the books are alive with hope, laughter, and compassion because that is what being human is, pulling joy out of despair. Spring involves a near-forgotten TV director and his late friend and mentor, a guard at an immigration detention center, a mysterious child performing rescue missions, the work of the artist Tacita Dean, the writers Rainier Maria Rilke and Katherine Mansfield, and an 18th century battle in Scotland. Like Kate Atkinson’s Big Sky, which must’ve been written at the same time, she mentions the song “Hunger” by Florence + The Machine.

While I was reading Spring I wasn’t in another lockdown hiding from 10,000 new covid cases daily, I was riding a succession of trains and then cramming into a lunch van with a lot of people on the way to an historical site. I was free and fully alive in the bizarre now. Smith has said that her goal was to capture the present moment (hence the brief publication schedule), and she does. Spring is a time machine to 2018.