Ali Smith revels in etymology. She loves wordplay and puns and homonyms and what Samuel Johnson – another great lexical player – disapprovingly called a “quibble”. I’m sure she knows that “current” means “running” (from the Latin currere). So the proclaimed purpose of her four previous books was always going to be problematic. Four novels, named for the seasons of the year, were written fast and published even faster in an attempt to close the gap between experience and a writer’s response to it. But the trouble with writing about current events is that they keep running on ahead of you. And running away from you. And running in directions you might not have foreseen. (Remember when Covid seemed like the world’s worst worry?) Besides, almost as soon as the series began, it became evident that Smith’s genius is too wayward to be contained within a programme, even a self-imposed one.
Smith’s writing is discursive and protean. She writes stories that turn into spells and exchanges that morph from Platonic dialogues into music-hall patter. In the seasonal novels she writes about Rilke and Katherine Mansfield, about Pericles and joinery and the potency of cheap music. She approaches the topic of immigration by way of an excursion to a second world war internment camp on the Isle of Man, and a plot strand relating to a modern boy’s obsession with Albert Einstein, who once lived as a refugee in a hut on a heath in East Anglia.
