This week I finally got around to reading Autumn by Ali Smith. I have been meaning to read it for a while because over the years I have been hearing an increasing volume of good things about her but because this was known as being her Brexit novel I ended up putting it off. I followed Brexit closely last year and so by the time this book came out I had become a little burnt out on the subject.
I had a similar thing with Howard Jacobson’s Donald Trump novel, Pussy. I went to see him talk at Cambridge literary festival and picked up a copy but still haven’t got around to reading it. There is just such a lot of Donald Trump in my life right now that what I need is a little less.
From what I understand both of these books were written with a lot of immediacy. Jacobson talked about going to his desk in a fury after the US election to get on with his book, like he was trying to get the rawest form of his own reaction to events down on paper before it became diluted. There will be plenty of time for objective analysis, but you can only have your first reaction once.
So I was expecting Autumn to be a bit like this. An outward looking, political sort of a book. An angry product of an angry time. And there is some of that in it. There are little references to real events in the real world that are still fresh in the mind, indeed that are still actively ongoing, and will be for some time. But it isn’t entirely like that. The scope of a novel about a major political event is going to be broad and far reaching, but the scope of Autumn is narrower, focusing as much on the small events of one person’s life. Brexit lurks in the background like a sinister shadow looming over everything, rarely mentioned explicitly, while the story of an old friendship unfolds. It’s a beautiful novel, and deserving of its place on the Booker longlist.
I was thinking recently that you can possibly think of books as either being outward or inward looking. There’s lots of ways categorising books (fiction/non-fiction, genres etc) but that the separation of books by whether they are exploring the world or exploring the person might be useful. Whether politics is the point of the book, or psychoanalysis. Science or meditation. I’m still trying to figure this idea out, it’s still only hazily formed in my head, but I thought it might be a useful way to think about writing at the point of writing. In which direction are you facing when you start putting the words down on the page? Are you writing about the world, or what it is like to be in the world?
But Autumn is a novel that is successfully looking in both directions at once. A book that isn’t just about politics, but the impact of politics on people, and of the impact of people on politics. The big events that inform our little lives. The narrow focus against a wider backdrop.
toby wallis 