Summer

 by Ali Smith     

This woman is a genius!! This is her fourth and final book of the Seasons.  She is amazing.  I love the power with which she writes, exquisite language, angry language.  Her books are all meant to reflect the tenor of the times, the first book takes place at the time of Brexit.  The final book, don't know how she wrote it so quickly is partly about post Brexit vote, immigrant internment and a pandemic.

Autumn

Some of the characters in the books carry through the four stories.  A main character is Mr Gluck, who in the last book is 104 years of age.  As a young boy he and his father were interned on the Isle of Man during the second world war because his father was German.  His sister for some reason stayed in Germany and he often saw her in the summer.  Mr Gluck was apparently a successful song writer. Later we learn that his sister got to France and was part of the resistance.  She got pregnant by another resistance fighter but eventually left her daughter with a farm family who had been helping her get people to safety in Switzerland.

In the first book we also meet Elisabeth, a young girl who is often ignored by her mother.  Mr. Gluck serves as an informal babysitter and mentor for her.  In the last book we find Mr Gluck is living with Elisabeth and her mother and Elisabeth is looking after him.  Mr. Gluck seems for the most part to be mostly sleeping and recalling the past.

Winter

Winter is the story of Sophie, her son Art and her Sister Iris.   Sophie was a successful entrepreneur.  Art is a blogger of Art in Nature.  He had intended to take his girlfriend Charlotte with him to spend Christmas with his mother but he and Charlotte have a breakup because Charlotte learned he was making things up on his blog.  Instead Art invites a total stranger to come with him.  They discover his mother is in dire shape, hardly eating, imagining a floating head.  Charlotte and Art contact Art's aunt who was a very active protestor in her youth to come and help with the mother.   The sisters had been estranged for years but seem to reconcile.  It turns out Art's mother owns a house that Art's aunt lived in as part of a commune years before.

Spring

The story starts with a young school girl who somehow gets past all security into an immigrant detention centre and convinces the boss to get all the bathrooms cleaned.  The next character we meet is Art a film director.  He is depressed because 1)his mentor Paddy has died from cancer and 2) he has been offered a film but he doesn't agree with the direction it is going in.  He hops on a train to get as far away from London as he can.  He gets off at a train station and jumps down on the tracks.  He is rescued by the young student who has somehow convinced a detention centre officer to accompany her to some special place in Scotland.  Art ends up joining up with them on their pilgrimage.  They end up meeting with some people who are working to help the illegal immigrants.  However, things go badly because the immigration centre guard calls her bosses to tell them what is going on and there is a raid.  Art drops the film he has been offered and starts making a film about the people working to help the immigrants.

Summer

In this book we meet a family, Mother Grace, children Robert and Sacha.  Grace and her husband have separated in part because they had opposing views on Brexit.  The husband now lives next door with a younger woman who can no longer speak.  Robert is very intelligent, interested in Einstein, but is getting into a lot of trouble because of being bullied at school.  His sister Sacha wants to change the world.  Robert crazy glues an egg timer to Sacha's hand to give her the gift of time.  A young couple, Art and his former girlfriend Charlotte find Sacha with a bleeding hand, from tearing the egg timer off her skin.  They had taken her to A and E for treatment and then taken her home.

Arthur and Charlotte have inherited Arthur's mother's estate and are living in her house with the Aunt Iris.  They tell the family that at the dead mother's request they are taking something to a man in northern England.  It turns out that Mr Gluck had a statue, mother and child, made up of two pieces of Marble.  At some point in time Mr. Gluck and Art's mother had had sex and she stole the round marble piece that was the child part of the sculpture.  She now whats it returned to Mr. Gluck. Robert is passionately in love with Charlotte even though he is much younger than she is.

Art and Charlotte invite the family to join them on the trip.  Art and Charlotte tell Sacha about a man they met in immigration detention called Hero. Sacha starts writing to him telling him about things on the outside world.  They get to see Gluck, who is being cared for by Elisabeth.  Gluck is now 104 and seems to spend most of his time in the "dreamtime" remembering his past.  He is delighted to have this precious sculpture back complete.  As the story concludes we find that Art and Elisabeth have fallen in love, Art stays with Elisabeth.  Charlotte goes back to live with Art's aunt who is preparing the house for an influx of immigrants who will be released from detention centres because of the pandemic.

At first Charlotte's reaction to Art's abandonment of her and everything else is to shut down and hide in her room but eventually she does overcome her ennui.

At the end of the book Robert says to Charlotte, I don't want to live in a (primal) world like that.

Charlotte responds "we're certainly living in one where the primal and the public have been getting more and more fused together.... but if you don't attend to the primal stuff inside us all.... where will it go.

I think that Ali is making us see that for as much as time moves on things don't change, people are imprisoned unjustly in the past and today also.  There is so much anger, lack of communication, irrational, cruel bureaucracy.

However, the book does show that there is the possibility for love, for caring for others, creating families of non related people. I think she is encouraging us to be aware, to act, even in a small way.

Phenomenal works!  Incredible insight!