What’s lucky about having a favourite way to die? Brit said.
If you don’t know how lucky you are to be even discussing the chance of a choice, the girl said, then all I can say is, you’re really really lucky. [loc. 1738]
Richard Lease, a TV director with a string of successful productions in his past but a bleak project looming, takes a train north from London on a whim. He's mourning the recent death of his friend, artistic collaborator and occasional lover Paddy (short for Patricia), and perhaps also the death of his own creativity. Ending up in Kingussie, he teeters on the brink of despair. And then comes salvation in the unlikely form of a young girl named Florence.
The novel rewinds, then, to show us how Florence ended up in Kingussie at just the right moment, in the company of Brit, who works as a DCO at an IRC -- a Detainee Custody Officer at an Immigration Removal Centre. Brit is rapidly becoming dehumanised by the job, but suddenly Florence appears, and appears to work miracles. The toilets are cleaned! A suicidal inmate becomes less miserable! And there are rumours about this 12-year-old: she walked out of a nasty sex house in Woolwich unscathed, she's been visiting various IRCs and shaking things up, maybe even liberating some of the detainees. Somehow she also persuades Brit to take her to Scotland, where they, and Richard, meet up with a mysterious woman who tells them her name is Alda Lyons. And Alda is the person who Florence has come to find ...
I hadn't made the connection between Florence and Marina, the wholesome lost daughter in Shakespeare's Pericles who remains untouched in a brothel and persuades the clients to think again: instead I was reminded of Persephone, goddess of spring, walking out of the underworld -- one of Brit's nicknames for the IRC. Florence longs to be reunited with her mother, too.
Here, as in the previous novels of the Seasonal quartet, there are layered cultural references: the art of Tacita Dean; the movies of Charlie Chaplin, and how they bring joy to detainees; Outlander, and how the TV show has affected Scottish tourism ... I was intrigued by Richard's somatization of ailments suffered by Mansfield and Rilke: his last, unfinished project with Paddy was based on a novel about Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke not meeting, though they were guests at the same hotel at the same time. Now he's breathless because of Mansfield's tuberculosis, and concerned that he'll start on Rilke's leukemia next. It's the perfect illustration of art affecting life.
As before, Smith gives voices to the inhuman, to myths and concepts, to big tech and to political movements. I loved the brief, fierce monologues of spring: 'I’m the green in the bulb and the moment of split in the seed, the unfurl of the petal, the dabber of ends of the branches of trees with the green as if green is alight.' There are puns, moments of beauty, moments of stupidity. I felt the novel lost a little momentum by having the major confrontation happen off-page, but I still enjoyed it immensely, and would like Florence -- another magical interloper, like Lux in Winter -- to return.
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