Nothing feels superfluous, and all things are linked, no matter how obliquely.What is to be done with hope? Ali Smith is a great artist of possibility. Pockets of other stories within the larger arc are just as enticing as the main tale. It can sometimes seem a bit awkwardly obvious, especially when the wartime internment of Daniel Gluck is contrasted with the internment of political prisoner/refugee Hero (Anh Kiệt) in the present, but even this is relatively nuanced. There is a poignancy to it which steers clear of a trite ending but allows for moments of beauty and quiet perceptiveness along the way. Summer is a well written document of the present, its relevancy alone a motive for reading. There’s something very digressively Sebaldian about Summer as well, in particular its part setting in Norfolk. I could go on endlessly scrolling through Wikipedia, but you get the picture.
The opera is cyclical, with Einstein’s own ideas of connectedness explored. Einstein’s exile is similarly another echo in the text. When originally conceived, the piece was potentially going to be about Chaplin or Hitler, both present in Summer. Philip Glass collaboratively created Einstein on the Beach as a document of this time. To follow one strand, the book almost ends on Roughton Heath, near Cromer, where Einstein stayed during the war. Smith’s Joycean trick of writing a novel that, seemingly linear, has cyclicality and an iceberg-like depth, allows for continuous literary detective work.
Summer echoes many texts ( A Winter’s Tale, David Copperfield, the story of Hero and Leander, etc.), as well as the other novels in the quartet, and is underpinned by the story of Einstein in Norfolk. She writes him and other young characters very well, with nothing of the awkwardness of other older writers. She has fallen a little into the pitfall of the hopeful, proselytising liberal, but this is tempered and questioned somewhat by the character of Robert. Smith has managed to achieve something that is particularly difficult – to write a fiction about the present without sounding naff.
This last book feels very fresh, because the pandemic is such a shock in itself. The Seasonal Quartet was sparked by the Brexit vote, but, depressingly, Brexit felt like nothing new, just a reiteration of old oppositions. This is surely one of the first works of published fiction to describe a Covid-world. Beyond the political dimension, one of the most peculiar things about Summer is how current it is. The siblings’ opposition initially seems too stark, too state of the nation, but this is softened by their love and sympathy for one another. Summer begins with Grace (former actress), her ex-husband and new partner who live next door, and her children Sacha (young activist) and Robert (a boy in the mould of Dominic Cummings et al).
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