Winter

Ali Smith's novel Winter opens with a rhetorical catalogue declaring that God, romance, poetry, democracy, love, and death itself are all dead. The litany establishes a post-truth, post-millennial atmosphere before locating its action on a bright Christmas Eve morning in Cornwall.

Sophia Cleves, a retired businesswoman of 70 living alone in a large house called Chei Bres, speaks to a disembodied child's head floating beside her. The size of a cantaloupe, with thick dark hair, the head bobs around the kitchen, sniffing at thyme on the windowsill. Sophia finds it charming and tells it that it is welcome. A flashback explains the head's origin: Five days earlier, Sophia noticed a blue-green dot at the edge of her vision that an optician could not explain. Over the following days the dot grew to the size of a child's head. One night Sophia shut it out, but it tapped at every window until she let it back in, presenting her a sprig of holly she wove through the door knocker as her Christmas wreath.

A flashback to February 1961 introduces Sophia's older sister, Iris, a charismatic teenager and ban-the-bomb activist whose politics infuriate their father. Iris pulls 14-year-old Sophia out of school and takes her to London to see the Elvis Presley film G.I. Blues. Sophia is deeply moved, and the outing represents a rare moment of closeness that Iris will later deny remembering.

Back on Christmas Eve, Sophia visits her bank, where she pays over 500 pounds annually for personal service, but the system is dysfunctional: Her adviser cannot resolve her query, the safes lock at noon, and the cash machine outside is broken. She drives home through scenes of commercial decline and sits at her kitchen table holding her head in her hands.

The narrative shifts to Art (short for Arthur), Sophia's son, on the winter solstice in London. Art works from home as a copyright consolidator for SA4A Entertainment, scanning media for rights infringements, and writes a nature blog called Art in Nature. His girlfriend Charlotte has recently left him after bitter political arguments and has been hijacking his Twitter account, posting fabricated nature sightings to humiliate him. Their conflicts centered on Charlotte's engagement with crises like Brexit and the refugee crisis versus Art's insistence that his writing is apolitical.

Art encounters Lux, a young woman of about 21 with multiple piercings, sitting at a bus stop reading a fast-food leaflet with extraordinary concentration. He speaks to her, and three days later meets her at Paddington Station, having offered her 1,000 pounds to pose as Charlotte at his mother's house over Christmas. On the train, Lux tells him she works at a warehouse packing deliveries. Her name, she says, is "Short for Velux [...] After, the, you know. Window" (74), though Art suspects she invented it. She removes her piercings before they arrive, and they reach Chei Bres in the dark.

The house is in disarray. The front door stands open, the heat is oppressively high, yet Sophia sits in the kitchen wearing a coat, scarf, gloves, and fur hat, staring blankly. The fridge is nearly empty. Sophia is hostile, telling Lux she is unwelcome. Lux handles her with calm directness, removing her hat and offering water. She takes Art aside and insists he call Iris, Sophia's estranged sister, whom Sophia has not spoken to in nearly 30 years.

The novel interweaves multiple time periods through the long Christmas night. In 1977, Sophia visits Iris at a communal house, feeling out of place while mourning her mother's recent death. In the mid-1990s, young Arthur recognizes Iris on television discussing pesticides and nerve gas; Sophia tells him the woman is nobody they know. In the early 1980s, a man approaches Sophia outside her home, and another appears uninvited at her dining table, trying to recruit her to monitor Iris for an intelligence service; when she refuses, the man pushes her down a flight of stairs. Another memory shows their father expelling Iris from the family home. Interstitial passages connect Iris to the Greenham Common peace camp, where women protested cruise missiles at a US airbase for two decades.

Iris arrives at Chei Bres at a quarter to three on Christmas morning after Art contacts her at Lux's urging. She brings boxes of food and wine and immediately recognizes that Lux is not Charlotte but plays along. Art and Lux explore the barn, full of unsold stock from Sophia's failed retail chain, Make Do, where they find a life-sized cardboard cutout of Godfrey Gable, Art's supposed father, a comedian whom Art met only twice.

Christmas lunch brings all four characters together. Sophia refuses to eat, claiming everything she consumes is poisonous. The conversation turns to politics: Sophia defends the Brexit vote; Iris counters that DNA proves everyone is family; Lux asks what the world will do about displaced people if the only answer is building walls. Sophia and Iris trade decades-old insults: mythologizer, solipsist, sophist, and swotty show-off. Lux redirects by asking each person to describe the most beautiful thing they have ever seen; she describes the imprint of a rosebud pressed in a Shakespeare folio in a library in Canada. Art experiences a vision: A slab of rock hangs suspended above their heads, casting a shadow. No one else sees it.

Meanwhile, the disembodied head continues to transform, losing its features and becoming a smooth, featureless stone. Sophia tucks it against her skin and hides it in her wardrobe. Its appearance recalls one half of a two-piece Barbara Hepworth sculpture, a mother-and-child pairing of stones, that Sophia once saw at the house of a man she loved.

On Boxing Day in the early hours, Sophia and Iris lie together on the floor. Iris asks Sophia to tell people about her work with refugees in Greece. They settle into uneasy reconciliation: "I hate you," Sophia says, and Iris replies, "I hate you too" (235). In another late-night encounter, Lux reveals her real identity: She is from Croatia, raised in Canada, a student who ran out of money. Her family carries war wounds despite no one having been physically harmed. Sophia, moved, begins to eat and confides that Art's real father is not Godfrey but the man she loved, whom she first met on Christmas night in 1977 near Iris's commune; Godfrey was a friend who married her to provide stability. Lux promises secrecy but tells Sophia she is wrong to think Arthur has not inherited the truth.

During the visit, Lux challenges Art about his blog, pointing out that nothing in his posts is genuinely observed. She asks him to tell her something truly remembered. Art recalls sitting on someone's knee, holding the holes in a knitted sleeve while being told a story about a child knocking on ice. Lux tells him this is what he should write.

On Boxing Day evening, Sophia and Iris fall into unexpected harmony, singing a song together in German and English. Both claim to have told Art the story of a child lost in the snow who reaches the underworld, a tale their own mother originally told them. That night, Art and Lux lie together in the barn. She advises him to stay with his mother and talk about his father, telling him that forgetting what made you is like "forgetting your own head" (313). Art pays Lux her 1,000 pounds. She puts her piercings back in and leaves in Iris's car.

The narrative flashes forward. Art offers Charlotte the blog, which she transforms into a politically engaged platform. He searches for Lux but cannot find her: The warehouse laid her off, and the librarian who banned her for trying to sleep in the library asks Art to send Lux her love. Art learns the Shakespeare folio Lux described is in the Fisher Library in Toronto. He finds an image online: a ghostly mark on a page, the real flower long gone but its trace still there. He maintains contact with both Sophia and Iris by texting them questions and copying each into the other's replies.

The novel closes with an American President telling crowds that people will start saying "Merry Christmas again," invoking winter in the middle of summer, and the recurring phrase: "Art in nature" (323).