Winter, by Ali Smith

The second of Smith’s seasonal quartet again explores themes of ageing, interaction with the natural world and society’s decline. Similarly to Autumn, it features an old person having weird hallucinations that hark back to their past; fraught parent-child relationships; and profound winter-spring romances, always with an older man and much younger woman. Another overlooked and forgotten female artist is also thrown into the mix, apropos of not much. Sophia lives in a huge, empty house in Cornwall. She has made no preparations for the visit of her son and his girlfriend for Christmas. In London, Art has been dumped and trolled by his girlfriend and his solution is to find a substitute for the visit, rather than explain or deal with his troubles. Sophia’s estranged sister, Iris, is called in to rescue the situation, but it is up to the substitute, Lux, to help heal old wounds and bring the family together. Autumn has more funny moments than Winter, but also contains quietly horrifying casual references to the degradation of living standards and services such as libraries and housing in contemporary Britain. It demonstrates the fallacy and self-destruction of people who claim to have no interest in politics, because everything is politics and truly the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. It questions the way people are valued and how this translates to an increasing divide between the haves and have-nots. Will Spring bring hope of change and renewal, or continue the theme of the long slow spiral downwards? Lockdown is possibly not the right circumstance to find out.