We’re always looking for the full open leaf, the open warmth, the promise that we’ll one day soon surely be able to lie back and have summer done to us; one day soon we’ll be treated well by the world. [loc. 3003]
Summer opens in Brighton, where siblings Sacha (16) and Robert (13) co-exist in uneasy opposition, while their mother Grace dreams of her long-gone acting career and their father lives in the house next door with his new girlfriend, Ashley, who has stopped speaking. Sacha's mother voted 'Leave', their father voted 'Remain'. Sacha is passionate about the environment: Robert is not really passionate about anything, except possibly offending people (oh, and the online gaming community where he discusses torture techniques). When Robert plays a trick on Sacha, she's aided by two people on Brighton Beach: these are Art and Charlotte, last seen in Winter, and somehow they take Sacha and Robert and their mother Grace along on a road trip, to see an old man who Art believes is his father. Art has a present for him from Art's mother Sophia: a stone sphere...
The pandemic has begun, in this novel ('a clever virus. That’s news. The stocks and shares will shake. There’ll be people who do very well out of that. One more time we’ll find out what’s worth more, people or money...' [loc. 1786]) but it's not really the focus of the story. Luckily Daniel is no longer at the Maltings Care Providers, where he would likely have become a Covid statistic. Instead, he's living with Elisabeth, and still drifting in and out of dreams and decades: he recalls internment on the Isle of Man during WW2, because his father, who grew up in England, never got the documents that would classify him as anything other than an enemy alien. (This resonated strongly with me. Somewhere I have a letter from the Home Office to my father, in 1951, telling him that they didn't think there'd be any need for him to formally apply for citizenship ...He'd already spent part of the war in a concentration camp in France, as an enemy alien there.)
As in the other three novels of the quartet, there are allusions to and echoes of a play by Shakespeare (The Winter's Tale, in which Grace played Hermione thirty years ago, a role that launched her acting career) and a focus on a female artist. Here it's Italian filmmaker Lorenza Mazzetti, who came to Britain after narrowly escaping execution during the war. Her story winds into that of Daniel's sister Hannah, lost in the chaos of wartime France: what Hannah did there is revealed, and, in a way, Daniel and she are reunited. (This scene brought tears to my eyes. '...it’s Hannah, God help him, there in the room, aged twelve, in the shape of a boy. Oh hello, Daniel says. Hi, Hannah says.')
There are a lot of connections and reconnections (not all of them predictable) in this novel, and a strong sense of the energy that people can generate against injustice. Kindness matters: art matters: connection matters. Apathy kills.
This novel, this quartet, makes me hopeful. 'Hope is a tightrope across a ravine', says Ali Smith in an interview. ... I look forward to rereading the quartet in a year or two, and I truly hope that I'll be reading from a calmer, safer, more open place, and be looking back on the bad old days. Ropes fray, though, and this ravine seems very wide.
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