Ali Smith
Summer by Ali Smith is the fourth book in her seasonal quartet. The novel introduces some new characters as well as revives familiar characters from the first three seasonal books. The novel takes us full circle in that Daniel Gluck, a central character in Autumn, the first book of the quartet, reappears in this book at the ripe age of 101 years old. Art, Charlotte, and Iris who appeared in Winter, also show up in Summer.
There is little plot. Narrative threads leap in time alternating between decades in the past when Daniel flashes back to his time being shuttled with his father to internment camps in England during the war, to the present day when he encounters Art, Charlotte, and the Greenlaw family. As always, Smith threads her novel with a critique of current politics—the climate disaster; detention of refugees; the pandemic; and the lockdown.
Running throughout the novel is a motif of locked doors, barbed wires, lockdowns, internment camps, and immigration removal centers. Daniel and his father experience incarceration in an internment camp; Charlotte sequesters herself in a bedroom while visiting Art’s aunt Iris; Grace Greenlaw goes looking for a church she remembers from thirty years ago and finds a wire fence that has blocked off most of the common; and Sacha, Grace’s daughter, sends letters to an immigrant locked up in a detention center.
Summer is the culmination of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet. It concludes with a letter dated July 1, 2020. Running the full gamut of emotions ranging from moral outrage, dismay, anger, acquiescence, hope, grief, and compassion, Smith has produced another memorable novel, bringing her quartet to a satisfying close.