Spring by Ali Smith review – luminous and generous

So here’s an admission: I enjoyed the first two novels in Ali Smith’s ultra-of-the-moment seasonal quartet, and found the formal inventiveness and sheer bravery of her project admirable: an author dowsing for signification in the frantic landscape of the now, then trying as closely as possible to write novels that speak with the voice of their age. I couldn’t help thinking, though, that rather than these four books written at breakneck speed, I might rather have another How to Be Both. That novel – her last before the quartet – was miraculous, and after reading Autumn and Winter for the first time, I began to worry that the whole scheme was flawed, asking Smith to sacrifice too many of her novels’ traditional satisfactions in order to meet the demanding schedule she’d set herself.

With Spring, all that concern melted away. It feels like two things are happening here. First, Smith is increasingly recognising the narrative possibilities of this new type of storytelling, finding deeper and more compelling ways of getting under the skin of her times. There’s something else, though. While reading Spring, I became suddenly aware of the extraordinary meta-novel – the year – that the quartet will form once it’s complete, and how thrilling and important that book will be. This is writing that acts by accretion, subliminally, weaving you into its webs of stories. Now that we are past the halfway mark it’s possible to perceive the shape of the whole, to recognise quite how dazzling the interplay of ideas and images between the four books will be.

Spring employs the same chorus of voices as its predecessors, beginning with a kind of throbbing vernal response to the litany of deadness at the beginning of Winter. Then we get into the story’s main narrative, which is the tale of Richard Lease, a semi-successful film director “on a train platform somewhere in the north of Scotland”. Richard’s friend and one-time collaborator Paddy (Patricia) Heal – a scriptwriter – has died of cancer, and he has taken himself north on impulse. His internal monologue is full of regret, harking back to conversations with Paddy on her deathbed the previous spring, or reaching further into their past together. He also, like Sophia in Winter, has an imaginary child, a fictionalised version of the daughter he no longer speaks to in the real world.

The other central figure in the novel is Brit – Brittany Hall, employed at a UK immigration removal centre by SA4A, the sinister security firm that has appeared in the previous books. Brit, a decent, educated, intelligent young woman, works within a system that is a stain on all of us. She knows it, too: “There were people in here, in a place designed when it was first built for 72-hour detention at the most, who’d been here for years, years and years.” Smith has been deeply involved with the brilliant Refugee Tales project over the past few years. In her contribution to the anthology that came out of that engagement, The Detainee’s Tale, there’s a passage that speaks to Spring’s interest in Britain’s shameful stance on the detention of refugees. “On the train home this evening, I’ll think of the moment you say to me, as we’re saying goodbye: people don’t know about what it’s like to be a detainee. They think it’s like what the government tells them. They don’t know. You have to tell them.”

Olivia Laing has spoken of the “radiant disruptors” who regularly appear in Smith’s novels. In The Accidental, it is Amber, who arrives with her glowing hair and becomes the central figure in the family. In Winter it is Lux, who brings life to the deadness of Sophia’s sad Christmas. In Spring, we find Florence Smith, a schoolgirl with powers that seem almost supernatural. She frees detainees, she persuades jaded bureaucrats to spring-clean prisons, she shames punters from a brothel and liberates the teenage prostitutes. “She makes people behave like they should, or like they live in a different better world.” Florence calls to mind an “old word from history and songs that nobody uses in real life any more. She’s good.”

There’s so much more to say about this luminous, generous, hope-filled novel. There’s Shakespeare again – Pericles this time; there are some beautiful ekphrastic passages about the work of Tacita Dean; there’s Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, there’s Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss, there’s Rilke and Shelley; there’s powerful commentary on the rabid voices of press, politics and social media; there’s death and time and TS Eliot. And all of this rich material feels amplified by the echoes and resonances that thrum between Spring and its predecessors. Like Florence Smith, her namesake, Smith is good. She has always been a profoundly moral writer, but in this series of novels she is doing something more than merely anatomising the iniquities of her age. She’s lighting us a path out of the nightmarish now.