Autumn

Autumn is a 2016 novel by the Scottish writer Ali Smith, the first of her Seasonal Quartet. Set in a Britain divided by the Brexit referendum, it circles the friendship between Elisabeth Demand and her centenarian neighbour Daniel Gluck, and is studied in HSC English Extension 1's elective on natural worlds.

Written and published in 2016, in the immediate aftermath of the United Kingdom's referendum to leave the European Union, Autumn was the first of Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet, conceived to catch its own historical moment. The novel is soaked in that moment - a country waking to find itself divided, the news accelerating past comprehension, fences going up around common land - but Smith's deeper move is to set all of it against the turning of a season, asking the reader to hold a frantic human politics and a slow, indifferent natural order in the same frame.

The novel has almost no conventional plot. It opens inside the dream of Daniel Gluck, a hundred and one years old and asleep in a care home, dreaming himself washed up young on a shore and encased alive within the trunk of a tree. Its living centre is his decades-long friendship with Elisabeth Demand, a thirty-two-year-old casual lecturer in the history of art, whom Daniel taught as a child to look at art, to distrust the news, and to read the world as a text that never closes. In 2016 she visits him as he sleeps his way toward death, reading aloud at his bedside.

Around this friendship Smith arranges the raw material of the year: a bureaucratic Post Office queue, Elisabeth's mother hurling a barometer at the electrified fence enclosing the village common, and the recovered life of Pauline Boty, the only woman in the first wave of British Pop art, whose collages give the novel its own fragmentary method. The book declines into November, and ends not in despair but on a rose still open in the cold.

Smith's autumn is drawn with a naturalist's precision and carries the full weight of the English elegiac tradition. The November pages refuse lyric elevation, while the borrowed Hopkins coinages "wanwood, leafmeal" import a whole lineage of grief in two words. Yet the pastoral's usual comfort is withheld. After a catalogue of rot and fog the prose turns to a rose still open in the cold, pulling the reader into an act of attention - the season offering continuance rather than cure.

Against the accelerated time of 2016, Smith sets deep time. Daniel's sense of how brief any human life is shrinks the human span to nothing, and the novel's compressed, time-shifting structure does the same work. His entropy aphorism, "That's the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it's in their nature", quietly folds the political disintegration of the year into a far older natural law, while the halved Dickens of the opening, "It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times", stages a present that has lost the balance the seasonal cycle still keeps.

The fenced common is the novel's key ecological and political image: shared ground, open to all lives, enclosed by electrified fences, an assertion of ownership over a shared world that is continuous with the walls rising between people. Wendy's answer - a barometer, a tool for reading the natural world, hurled at the wire - turns rage into argument.

Against decline stands attention: Daniel's "How else will we read the world?" makes perception an ethical discipline, and his simile "Language is like poppies" refuses the division between culture and nature, human words one more of the living world's cycles of fall and return.

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