The very best novels often leave me with the same uncomfortable feeling.  That feeling that something important has eluded me, that some “way of seeing” is just beyond my grasp and, if I only concentrated a little more or reflected a little differently, I would unlock the meaning or meanings of the art. It’s always an unsettling thing, but it’s even more so when a novel is apparently so simple and artless.  I felt it as I turned every page of Ali Smith’s Autumn, so much so that I wanted to start it all over again immediately.  Woven into the fabric of the straightforward and simply told story, the anything-but-simple matter of how we experience time and memory in our lives twisted and turned, leaving me with that maddening impression: I’m missing something.  I’ve heard Autumn is the first in a planned tetralogy, so we’ll see if the mists lift as I read the others.

Critics loved Autumn.  It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.  Reviewers greeted it as the first Brexit or post-Brexit novel, though I’m not sure what that means.  The Britain portrayed in Autumn is a grim place: broken by inequality and division, fearful of strangers and change, yet somehow redeemed by the sincere, touching love between Daniel and Elisabeth.  As I continue to puzzle over this wonderful novel, I want to quote a passage that seems (confused as I am) to get close to the heart of its meaning:

“It’s a question of how we regard our situations, how we look and see where we are, and how we choose, if we can, when we are seeing undeceivedly, not to despair and, at the same time, how to act.  Hope is exactly that, that’s all it is, a matter of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we’re here for a mere blink of the eyes, that’s all.  So it’s important not to waste the time, our time, when we have it.”