Autumn

The first installment of Ali Smith's Seasonal quartet opens with Daniel Gluck, an old man, washed ashore on a sunlit but cold sandy strand in what appears to be an afterlife. His body is aged and ruined, yet his eyesight is miraculously sharp. When he discovers his body has become young again, he flees naked into a copse of trees and sews himself a coat of green leaves with a needle and golden thread that appear in his hand. Returning to the shore, he finds the bodies of drowned people alongside living holidaymakers sitting under parasols, oblivious to the dead. Daniel contemplates the coexistence of death and life.

In the waking world, Elisabeth Demand, a 32-year-old casual-contract junior lecturer in art history, visits the main Post Office near her mother's village to renew her passport. She waits nearly two hours, reading Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and learns from the clerk that many people come to sit here since the local library closed. The clerk rejects her passport photographs because her face is too small for the required measurements, writing "HEAD INCORRECT SIZE" in the rejection box. After this encounter, Elisabeth takes a bus to The Maltings Care Providers plc, the care facility where Daniel now lives.

Daniel lies in what the staff call an increased sleep period, a state that occurs when patients are close to death. He is tiny in the bed, skeletal, with long pauses between each breath. Elisabeth has claimed to be his next of kin to gain visiting access. She sits beside him, reads to him from Ovid's Metamorphoses and Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, and imagines the conversations they would have if he were awake. The cave of his open mouth represents to her "the threshold to the end of the world as she knows it" (36).

Their friendship stretches back decades. In a flashback to April 1993, eight-year-old Elisabeth must interview a neighbor for a school project, but her mother, Wendy Demand, refuses to accompany her. Wendy dismisses the man next door, bribes Elisabeth to fabricate the interview, and then takes the charming result over the back fence to Daniel Gluck himself. The next day, Daniel waits for Elisabeth on his garden wall. He tells her that her surname likely derives from the French de monde, meaning "of the world," and that his own name means "lucky and happy." He declares them lifelong friends.

Over the following years, Daniel becomes Elisabeth's intellectual mentor. He teaches her that words are organisms and that language is like poppies waiting to bloom. He describes paintings from memory, works by an artist he calls "the Wimbledon Bardot," whose name he does not reveal: Marilyn Monroe surrounded by roses, a woman whose body is made of images, a collage with a deep blue background and a giant hand holding a baby's hand. At 13, Elisabeth clashes with her mother over the friendship. Wendy questions what an old man wants with a teenage girl and forbids Elisabeth from seeing Daniel. Daniel also teaches Elisabeth a storytelling game called "Bagatelle," in which he insists that "whoever makes up the story makes up the world" and that one should "always try to welcome people into the home of your story" (119).

These paintings, the reader gradually learns, are the works of Pauline Boty, a British Pop Art painter of the 1960s. At 18, marching in London against the Iraq War, Elisabeth discovers a cheap exhibition catalogue of Boty's work in a bookshop. The catalogue reveals Boty as the only significant female British Pop artist, someone Elisabeth's art history tutor categorically denies ever existed. Boty made collages, paintings, and stage sets; she died of cancer at 28 after refusing an abortion that would have allowed radiotherapy. Elisabeth recognizes every painting Daniel described and changes her dissertation topic to Boty. She eventually brings the catalogue to Daniel. He opens the book, flushes, then lights up. He tells Elisabeth that in his whole life he loved only once, and it was not a person. He taps the book's cover and says he fell in love with a way of seeing, with "how eyes that aren't yours let you see where you are, who you are" (160). Elisabeth tries to leave the catalogue with him, but Daniel insists she take it back. A coldness sweeps through her as she realizes his great love was for Boty's artistic vision, not for any person. This revelation explains Elisabeth's 10-year absence from Daniel's life.

The novel is set in the summer and autumn of 2016, just after the United Kingdom's referendum on European Union membership. In a rhythmic, litany-like passage, Smith catalogues contradictory reactions using the repeated phrase "All across the country": people feeling they won and lost, looking up "what is EU?" on Google, drawing swastikas, telling people to leave. Elisabeth walks through her mother's village and sees a cottage painted with "GO HOME" in black. Later, someone paints beneath the words in bright colors, "WE ARE ALREADY HOME THANK YOU," flanked by a tree and red flowers. Wendy tells Elisabeth about a new fence, three metres high with razorwire and security cameras, erected across nearby common land. She delivers a litany of exhaustion: She is tired of the news, the vitriol, the liars, the violence, the fear. On a later visit, Elisabeth discovers the fence has doubled into two parallel layers of chainlink. A man from a private security company orders her off the land and threatens legal charges. She photographs the fence and the weed-life already pushing back through the churned mud.

Woven through the present-day narrative are Daniel's dream-visions. He envisions Christine Keeler, the young woman at the center of the Profumo affair, a 1960s political scandal involving sex, espionage, and government deception. His memory shifts to the Old Bailey, where he watched a young dancer testify that her statements to police were coerced; the judge instructs the jury to disregard her testimony entirely. His memories reach further back: He is 16 on a train through spruce woods with his younger sister. Fellow passengers discuss tools for measuring racial features. His sister says in English that she will not let it stop her reading. A separate historical interlude set in 1943 follows a young woman named Hannah Gluck, Daniel's younger sister, traveling under false identity papers in Nazi-occupied Nice, France, as one of nine women being rounded up; she steps off the truck with quiet defiance. A care assistant later tells Elisabeth what Daniel never told her: During the war, he entered an internment camp with his German-born father even though he could have stayed outside, and he tried but failed to bring his sister over from the continent. In his deep sleep, Daniel cannot remember her name.

A thread of warmth enters through Wendy's transformation. Selected for a television antiques programme called The Golden Gavel, she befriends Zoe Spencer-Barnes, a former 1960s child actress now working as a psychoanalyst. One evening, Elisabeth walks into the sitting room and finds her mother sitting in Zoe's lap, kissing. Elisabeth winks at Zoe and says her mother has been waiting for this since she was 10 years old.

The novel's threads converge in its closing pages. Wendy gets arrested for hurling a barometer at the electrified fence on the common land, shorting it out. Her plan is to bombard the fence daily with artefacts from more philanthropic times. Zoe delivers the news that matters most: Daniel has been asking for Elisabeth. At The Maltings, the receptionist, watching Game of Thrones on her iPad, tells Elisabeth that Daniel has eaten a good lunch and is looking forward to seeing his granddaughter. Elisabeth sits beside him with A Tale of Two Cities and closes her eyes. When she opens them, his eyes are open. He is looking straight at her. She says hello. He asks what she is reading.

A closing lyrical passage marks November: fog, sycamore seeds hitting glass, leaves stuck to wet pavement. "But there are roses, there are still roses. In the damp and the cold, on a bush that looks done, there's a wide-open rose, still. Look at the colour of it" (260).