I’m tired of the news. I’m tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren’t, and deals so simplistically with what’s truly appalling... I’m tired of the violence there is and I’m tired of the violence that’s on its way, that’s coming, that hasn’t happened yet. I’m tired of liars. I’m tired of sanctified liars. I’m tired of how those liars have let this happen. I’m tired of having to wonder whether they did it out of stupidity or did it on purpose. ... I’m tired of animosity. I’m tired of pusillanimosity.
I don’t think that’s actually a word, Elisabeth says.
I’m tired of not knowing the right words, her mother says. [loc. 518]
An old man is dreaming and remembering, rhyming and trying to work out whether he's dead. A young woman is trying to renew her passport at the Post Office, but staff reject her photo because her hair is wrong. She goes to sit beside the sleeping man at the Maltings Care Providers, and reads to him from Brave New World. These are Daniel Gluck and Elisabeth Demand; they both care about art, about books, about music; they have been friends since Elisabeth was eight years old. They are both lost, to some extent, in their memories and their dreams: and Smith unfolds their stories in a mosaic of scenes, remembered and forgotten, from their pasts.
Autumn ricochets through times real and imagined, but if it has a chronological setting it's the summer of the Brexit Referendum. 'All across the country, what had happened whipped about by itself as if a live electric wire had snapped off a pylon in a storm.' Foreigners, and anyone who looks foreign, are being told to go home. Families are divided: so are villages. The art of almost-forgotten Sixties artist Pauline Boty is woven through the story, as are references to Christine Keeler and allusions to Shakespeare's Tempest. (Daniel dreams he's imprisoned in a pine tree, while Elisabeth recalls a production of the play, and focusses on the father-daughter relationship: she's never known her own father.)
Smith's rage at the referendum result flavours the novel, but doesn't overwhelm it. The focus is on Daniel and Elisabeth, and on Elisabeth's relationship with her mother, and -- just a little -- on her mother's schoolgirl crush on a TV star. Autumn is a surprisingly lovely book -- surprising because I knew it was 'about' Brexit -- and reading it confirmed my decision to read the whole 'Seasonal' quartet in one indulgent swoop.
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