Feb 20

Feb 20 Winter (Seasonal Quartet, #2)

Author: Ali Smith
Publisher: Ali Smith
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

Winter. Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. And now Art's mother is seeing things. Come to think of it, Art's seeing things himself.

When four people, strangers and family, converge on a fifteen-bedroom house in Cornwall for Christmas, will there be enough room for everyone?

Winter. It makes things visible. Ali Smith's shapeshifting Winter casts a warm, wise, merry and uncompromising eye over a post-truth era in a story rooted in history and memory and with a taproot deep in the evergreens, art and love.

TL;DR Review

Winter is another quiet but profound installment of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet. I’m once again awed by how she does so much with so little. Can’t wait for Spring!

For you if: You like a short book that begs you to take your time.

Full Review

Winter had me hooked from the very first line, “God was dead: to begin with.” Many readers will recognize this as a spoof of the opening line of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (“Marley was dead: to begin with”), which is one of my favorite books of all time. What a way to set the stage for this quiet, focused story about perception and family and climate change and immigration and connection and the “post-truth” era.

At the center of the novel is a man named Art, who runs a (disingenuous) blog called Art in Nature. After his girlfriend, Charlotte, dumps him right before he was supposed to bring her home for Christmas, he meets a girl named Lux at a bus stop and pays her to come and play the role of Charlotte. They arrive to find Art’s mother — who is secretly hallucinating a floating baby head — in the dark with no food in the house. They call Art’s estranged aunt, a former nuclear protester, to come help.

I sort of wish I had read this book in December, but it was still a delight. There are so many layers here in such a short book, not least of which is the theme of visitations and spectres recalling A Christmas Carol again. I loved Lux: she’s near-homeless, an immigrant, arriving unexpectedly, gluing everyone together — more hints of Christmas. But it’s really not a Christmas book; it’s really about these characters and their interiorities and relationships amidst the broader context of England’s political landscape at the time (post-Brexit), all of which Ali Smith writes so well.

I know Winter doesn’t tend to be most people’s favorite of the Seasonal Quartet, but I might have liked it even more than Autumn — if only for its connection to my dear old Scrooge. Can’t wait to continue on to Spring!