Spring: A Novel

By Ali Smith

From the Man Booker Prize Finalist comes the third novel in her Seasonal Quartet—a New York Times Notable Book and longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2020

What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit,  the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times?

Spring. The great connective.

With an eye to the migrancy of story over time and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tell the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown, Smith opens the door.

The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story?

Hope springs eternal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781101870785

Ali Smith

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She studied at the University of Aberdeen and Newham College, Cambridge. Her first book, Free Love and Other Stories (1995) won the Saltire First Book of the Year award and a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Her novel Autumn was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker. She lives in Cambridge.

Reviews for Spring

[msf59 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“April.It teaches us everything.The coldest and nastiest days of the year can happen in April. It won’t matter. It’s April.”“Even the machine has to encounter nature, not even it can escape the earth. There's something reassuring in that.” "The light starts to push back, stark in the cold. But birdsong rounds the day, the first and last thing as the light comes and goes." The third in Smith’s seasonal quartet is a tough one to describe. It is more immersive and introspective, than plot driven. Four different people get thrown together, while traveling through Scotland. An aged film director, a security guard, a librarian and a mysterious twelve-year-old girl. How their lives change on this chance meet-up, is the thrust of the story. There are plenty of ruminations on Shakespeare, poetry, climate change and Brexit. Not always an easy read but her lovely writing and pure ambition make it worthy of your time.

[cbl_tn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Richard is an aging filmmaker who’s just lost his best friend, screenwriter Paddy. Brittany is a security guard at an Immigration Removal Centre. Florence is a child with a mysterious ability to get people to do things they don’t want to do. Their lives will unexpectedly collide in Kingussie, Scotland.The arts are as prominent in this book as in the first book in Smith’s Seasonal Quartet. This time it’s Katherine Mansfield, Rainer Maria Rilke, Charlie Chaplin, Beethoven, and visual artist Tacita Dean. There is grief, depression, and fear, but also the hope signified by spring.The writing is what I’ve come to expect from Smith, yet it feels a bit derivative. Richard’s conversations with an imaginary daughter is a device Atwood uses to good effect in Hag-Seed. And the whole book has the feel of a Jackson Brodie novel, but without Jackson Brodie.

[lynnb_64 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There are so many excellent reviews already posted that I can't possibly add much insight. I loved this book....but at first, I didn't. We start with the story of Richard, an aging film maker who was more famous decades ago. He has recently lost his best friend and co-worker, finds himself alone with only an uninspiring project offered to him. There is a sudden jolt in the novel, and we move to the story of Brit, an officer in charge of immigrants awaiting deportation and a young schoolgirl named Florence. I wondered if these stories would come together because they were so different. As I became more engrossed in this story, I started liking the book again. And they do come together in a wonderful way. The book contains the message of the importance of hope in spite of every evidence to the contrary.

[jbd1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The third in Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet, and another good, engaging read. I really enjoy Smith's wonderfully complex narratives.

[alexrichman_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

My least favourite of the season cycle so far. It’s funny really, as the meat of the story - examining detention centres - arguably gets closer to examining modern Britain than the “blah Brexit blah“ of its predecessors.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Spring follows a similar sort of recipe to the previous two in the seasonal quartet: a not-quite-resolved story involving characters who refuse to fit well into current society and who sometimes seem to have a touch of the allegorical about them; extended references to some of Smith's artistic heroes (Katherine Mansfield, Rilke, Tacita Dean and Charlie Chaplin); and gloriously ranting Dickensian prose-poems telling us about some of the many things that are wrong with society. Having played around with the openings of A tale of two cities and A Christmas carol in the previous parts, this one riffs on the opening of Hard Times, which of course leads us into one of the big themes of the book: the increased obligation artists have to tell the truth in a society that seems to have given up valuing facts over lies. That side of the story is represented in particular by Richard, a TV director who made radical, hard-hitting dramas back in the seventies with his mentor and writing partner Patricia, but is finding it hard to see a way forward since her death. The other big topic is the vast and all-but-invisible Gulag created in the service of Mrs May's Hostile Environment for (those suspected of being) foreigners, which is represented by Brittany, who works as a guard for a private security company at one of their Immigration Detention Centres, and seems to be losing the ability to live a normal life as a result. All this is stirred up and shuffled around by one of Smith's always-wonderful mischievous agents of change, a young girl called Florence who sometimes seems to be a normal high-school student, and at other times turns into a kind of personification of spring. As usual, we're left in a little bit of doubt about where precisely all the bits have landed, and there seem to be two or three competing endings out there, including one in which Kingussie is a station on the Underground Railroad, but - as with the others in the series - it's not the narrative that drives this story, but the reader's engagement with Smith's argument about the dangers of sitting back and not doing our little bit to help fix things (however quixotic) when we see something wrong happening in the world around us.It would be worth getting just for the Hockney cover-art, but there's a lot more to enjoy when you get past that, even if this is one of Smith's darker works.

[cariola_6 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I started reading this book a few weeks ago. After reading the first chapter--a full-on rant in the voice of a member of the so-called "populist" right--I put it aside. I mean, I have to hear about Trump's tweets and rallies and rants and actively avoid his supporters' facebook posts every day, so did I want to read more of the same? Nope. So I put it aside. Fortunately, I liked Autumn and Winter enough that I went back to it. And fortunately, that is the only full-on rant. Maybe Smith had to get it out of her system before she got to her characters. Or maybe she wanted to make sure that she had set the stage for her novel. If you pick up this book, just keep reading. I promise, it's not all misery and hate.Richard Lease is a director best known for his 1970's TV plays. Now in his 60s, he's mourning the death of his writing partner and trying to work on a film adaptation of 'April,' a popular novel spun off the fact that the writers Katherine Mansfield and Rainier Maria Rilke stayed in a Swiss resort town at the same time but never met. It's a premise that he initially detested, but his partner, Paddy, convinced him that it could be wonderful, and after reading some of each writer's work and doing research on their lives, he is seeing new possibilities. The problem is that the director has other ideas--in short, a romance with (of course) hot sex scenes in every conceivable (and inconceivable) location. After several conversations with his imaginary daughter (who at Paddy's suggestion replaced the real one he hasn't seen in 27 years), he decides to end it all by laying on the underground tracks.Brit is a young DCO in an IRC for the HO--in other words, she works in a detention center for newly arrived immigrants. She's torn by empathy for some of the detainees, considering the filthy, crowded conditions in which they are living and the fact that most have stayed far longer than the law dictates, and by the necessity of developing a hard shell to survive in her job. The DCOs have been exchanging stories about a girl who somehow got past security and into the director's office, where she convinced him to bring in professionals to steam clean the toilets. And it is rumored that the girl went into a brothel and freed all of the trafficked sex workers. On her way to work one day, Brit sees a young girl heading towards the underground and is convinced that this is the magical child of the stories. Coincidence upon coincidence brings them to the platform where young Florence notices Richard on the tracks.And so begins an unlikely adventure and an unlikely partnership. Florence is, on one hand, an extremely precocious child, but on the other, as she says, "I'm just a twelve-year old girl." She is fascinated by an old post card depicting a lake in Scotland and convinces first Brit and then Richard to join her. Once they arrive as far as they can go by train, they persuade Alda, an immigrant food truck owner, to drive them the rest of the way. In her food truck.Spring is marked by all of the characteristics of an [[Ali Smith]] novel: a literary and artistic intelligence (Mansfield, Rilke, Shelley, Shakespeare, Charlie Chaplin, Nina Simone, and a little known photographer, Tacita Dean), politics (Brexit, racism, anti-immigration, global warming, the 24-hour news cycle, social media, etc.), plenty of humor, and brilliant writing. It's structure loosely re-imagines Shakespeare's [Pericles], one of the late romances in which a young girl brings redemption to the older generation--Smith's stab at bringing hope into today's challenging and often ugly world. It's a wonderful story, not one that whisks away all the world's problems in the end but that at least presents the possibility of optimism.Each novel in this planned quartet has been better than the last. I can't wait to see what Summer will bring.

[mooingzelda · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After enjoying Autumn and especially Winter, I'm a bit torn over Spring. One the one hand, it's as well-written as you'd expect, with some lively dialogue and interesting cultural references. On the other, I wasn't a huge fan of the character of Richard, who I found somewhat difficult to connect with, especially in the scenes taking place in Scotland. I found Brit more interesting, but I wasn't quite sure what Florence, the miraculous schoolgirl, was supposed to represent. The previous reviewer suggests that she is the essence of the younger generations who will fight more than adults today to get the world back on the right track, which makes sense to an extent. However, that isn't a simple thing to do in the face of adult, mainly right-wing cynicism (as we can see from the response to school strikes for climate action at the moment), and it seems that Florence finds it all a bit too easy for my liking. But then again, this is Spring, the season of hope, and surely we all need a bit of that at the moment?

[patsymurray · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel is something of a departure from Ali Smith's previous work as there is a plot, but in many other ways it is exactly what I have come to expect from her. The novel is fast-paced, emotionally moving, and works to expand your thinking in new ways, as in when she suggests that boundaries could be viewed as uniting two countries, rather than dividing them. Perhaps an even better example is setting the capture of refugees running from the authorities on the battlefield of Culloden. As usual, there is much here that I don't quite understand. I have a glimmer of understanding as to why Paddy is in the novel, but I am not really all that certain. Although she is dying, she is meant to represent renewal, or at least a different take on death. She is here for the same reason Katherine Mansfield and Rilke are in the book, but that reason eludes me: art that always strives for a new beginning? It just doesn't seem to fit all that well.

[therebelprince · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A soft four stars. I think I don't love Spring as much as I love the two previous novels in Smith's quartet, Autumn and Winter but nevertheless the author's passionate, witty, deeply angry intellect is on grand display here.

I wonder how these books will read in 30 years, when I think we as humans will look back on this time with a great deal of despair and regret. Regardless, these books are a time capsule of an upset Western world, drawing together art and politics, history and the present, naturalism and mythology, into a compelling literary strand.

[steve02476 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Didn’t understand it all, but I liked the way she told the story and the way she provoked feelings about the inhumane treatment of immigrants and refugees. Probably too modern for a poorly educated old geezer but I definitely got something from it.

[castlelass · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the third book in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet. There are two main storylines, both set in the UK in the same present time frame, which converge near the end. The first story involves aging television director Richard Lease, and his good friend, mentor, and scriptwriter Patricia (Paddy) Neal. As the story opens, Paddy has died, and Richard is attending her funeral. We gradually learn about the mentoring relationship of Paddy and Richard, a project Richard is working on (of which Paddy does not approve), and pieces of their backstories.

The second story involves Detainee Custody Officer Brittany Hall. She is working a job she does not like for a security company in charge of an Immigration Removal Centre (IRC). A girl has gained access to the IRC and managed to get improvements made. This girl asks Brittany a series of questions, and Brittany ends of following her on a train traveling to Scotland.

The narrative jumps back and forth between the two stories in a rather disjointed way. There is not much of a flow here, though there is a lot going on, such as explorations of art, literature, scriptwriting, a number of political issues, grief, environmentalism, and economics. The main theme is the UK’s anti-immigration policies and what happens to detainees. She leaves a lot of loose ends for the reader to connect. Personally, I prefer a bit more of a straightforward story, but it is imaginative and clever, filled with lots of cultural and historical references.

[streamsong_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel revolves around three incongruous characters: a film director, a security guard at an immigrant center and a somewhat magical teen who goes about setting things right, including saving the director from a suicide attempt and improving conditions at the immigration center. If I had to name a theme, I would say it is loss and change, perhaps hanging on until the next better thing comes along. Isn’t that what spring is? Winter is over and something new (good or bad) is coming. Yet I found this one less engaging than the previous two in the series. There were parts where the writing sang for me; however it just didn’t hang together well and told less of a story than Fall and Winter.I’ll probably go on to Summer, but am less enthusiastic than I was before I read this volume

[drfuriosa · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a book of our time for our time. Ali Smith captures the noise and inhumanity of social media, the threads of stories that we are living, the refugee crisis and detainment that strips away humanity, the ignorance and willful blindness to humanity that some willingly embark upon. This book is beautiful and bleak at once, full of hope and despair intertwined. I have greatly appreciated the slow burn of this book and cannot wait to read Summer next year. Once I do, I plan to re-read all of the books in immediate sequence to see what connections can be made in the cycle.