Spring, which is the third book in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, is one of those books with two intersecting storylines where I was initially sad when the perspective shifted, because I liked the first storyline so much and wasn’t sure how the rest of the book could compare. But this is Ali Smith, so I needn’t have worried: the rest of the book won me over. Like Autumn and Winter, Spring is very of the moment: most of the book’s action takes place in October 2018, though there are memories of earlier years and little glimpses of certain characters’ futures. The first storyline is centered on a film and television director in his late sixties named Richard, who’s at a train station somewhere in the north of Scotland. He’s frustrated with his work, and grieving for his best friend/work collaborator, an older woman named Paddy. In the second storyline, we meet Brit, who works at an immigration removal centre, and Florence, a twelve-year-old girl who brings a bit of magic realism to the book with her uncanny ability to move through the world with ease, getting people to do what she wants. In addition to the narratives of these storylines we get other things: bits of writing by Florence, part of a script for a terrible film project Richard has been working on with a writer he can’t stand, lists of things Brit has learned at her work, a letter from Paddy to Richard, postcards from Richard to Paddy. There are also things about Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke (the terrible film project is about them) and Tacita Dean (whose work Richard sees at a gallery show) and of course about spring and hope and life and change. We read about “the thinnest of green shoots” splitting a rock, and about “transformation. How we’re changed by things. Or made to change, Or have to learn to change” (9, 276). We read that life “can change over time, what looks fixed and pinned and closed in a life can change and open, and what’s unthinkable and impossible at one time can will be easily possible in another” (248).
There are a lot of great things in this book, but one of my favorite things is how Richard has an “imaginary daughter”: he’s divorced, and estranged from his ex-wife and their child, but Paddy at one point suggests he imagine his daughter as being with him—suggests that he take this imagined daughter to galleries and plays and on holiday, and send Paddy postcards as he does. I love that Richard does send postcards to Paddy, over the course of decades, and I love how the image of the postcard recurs at certain points in the book, and I love how Richard uses his imaginary daughter as a reference point, and I really love this, from after Richard sees Tacita Dean’s chalk drawings of clouds (one of which, Why cloud, is reproduced in the back of the book):
They’d made space to breathe possible, up against something breathtaking. After them, the real clouds above London looked different, like they were something you could read as breathing space. This made something happen too to the buildings below them, the traffic, the ways in which the roads intersected, the ways in which people were passing each other in the street, all of it part of a structure that didn’t know it was a structure, but was one all the same. (79)
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