Summer

Yes, the final instalment of Ali Smith's seasonal quartet is finally out! Out in an edition that fits with the other three novels, I mean; the actual novel was published more than a year ago already.
So, after Autumn, Winter, and Spring, Summer is finally here. The first novels dealt (sideways) with Brexit, Trump and immigration, big themes of our times. I don't know what the original theme for the fourth novel was going to be, but with the corona pandemic and lockdown going on around us, this kind of became the theme. Or one of them. I read somewhere that Ali Smith always wanted to end the quartet with summer, to be sure she'd end on a high note, but with it becoming somewhat of a 'lockdown novel', I'm not sure this went exactly how she'd planned it. But then again, that is the story of 2020 in a nutshell.

Like the other novels, Summer consists of several interwoven stories. We meet Sacha, who tries to save the world from global warming, and her brother and mother who each have troubles of their own. Their father has moved next door with his new girlfriend, but is somehow still part of the family. They meet Art and Charlotte and go on a journey together before the lockdown takes hold.

The other main storyline concerns Daniel, an elderly man in a care home who alternates between this time and his memories of being interred on the Isle of Man during WWII. I really loved his storyline; his thoughts were one fluid motion between his memories and the present day, which made for interesting transitions. The two story lines meet at some point, but I won't spoil that for you. Apart from that, there are several references to the other storyline, sometimes in the simple form of a word such as 'letterbox'. Thinking that Ali Smith has written this book on such tremendous speed and was still able to intersperse these little references, to weave the web of this novel so finely, amazes me. She really is an amazing writer.

Now there are supposedly many, many links between the four novels of this quartet, as I mentioned in my very short review of Spring. Recurring characters, recurring references to art, recurring themes. For me, most of these went way over my head. When one of the characters walked past the fence of an immigration centre, I realised that I'd read about that same fence before. I knew there was something to do with a fence in Autumn, and people chaining themselves to a fence in Winter, and something to do with an immigration service in Spring. Was this all the same fence? Really? This realisation came about three quarters through the book. At that point, I belatedly realised that yes, all of these novels are interconnected, but at so many more levels than I'd thought. Somehow I'd missed that completely. But thinking about it, the name SA4A rang a bell somewhere, as did Art in Nature.

Then I went back to my review for Autumn, and lo and behold, Daniel is one of the main characters in that novel too. And Summer apparently explained several untold mysteries from that novel, mysteries I'd already completely forgotten about. Art and Charlotte are some of the protagonists of Winter, who apparently I'd also forgotten all about. That may be the trouble with these novels; the main themes stick, the examples and ideas that you need to think about for days after finishing one of these novels, but the characters and plot elements are gone pretty quickly. If I were to read all four novels back to back (which I will definitely do at some point in the future), I'd probably see a lot more of these neat little connections, these wires that not just connect the stories within the novels, but all the novels into one big story.

So what is Summer about? This is one of the hardest questions to answer with Ali Smith, she has so many themes and ideas and storylines that they all bundle together to create one whole. The blurb tells us; "People on the brink of change. They're family, but they think they're strangers." I think that applies not only to the characters in Summer, but to all the characters in Ali Smith's novels. "So: where does family begin? And what do people who think they've got nothing in common have in common?"

The whole series is about divisions, groups of people being set against each other for no particularly good reason. For the final novel to function as a bringer-together of people is a hopeful note. This must be the high note she mentioned in that review.

Of the four novels, Autumn is still my favourite, although apparently I can't quite remember what it is about. Summer felt a bit too rushed in places, too much trying to be current, with sideway references to events that don't really fit in the main theme. But Ali Smith did an amazing job writing this quartet that feels so current and still so universal. I'm sure if you were to reread these novels in about 10 years, you would get a pretty accurate picture of what the main events of the time did to people's lives. But I would strongly suggest reading all four novels closer together than I did, so you can actually see the full magic at work.

The Midnight Library

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig is one of those rare books I bought purely on the blurb text. I was wandering through the bookshop, this must have been one of the first times back after the last lockdown, and noticed a dark blue book with a bright house on the front. And a cat. You can always trick me into picking up your book when you put a cat on the front. I knew the author from his Reasons for staying alive book, and I knew he wrote other things, but I hadn't heard of this particular book. The blurb told me it was about Nora, who "at the stroke of midnight on her last day on earth [...] finds herself transported to a library", where she can "undo her regrets and try out each of the other lives she might have lived". Well, who doesn't want that? Who, in random moments, hasn't thought about choices and regrets and mused how their life may have turned out if they'd done things differently? And who doesn't want to know that happens when you actually get the chance? So this book was coming home with me.
(It was only later that I found out that this is a hugely popular book, finding it's way into top 10s and top 5s and 'must read this summer' lists. I just loved the premise on the blurb.)

So the book turns out to be closer to Haig's self-help novels than I first thought. Nora doesn't just 'live her last day on earth'; she commits suicide. Because her life has gone downhill; she has been fired, she doesn't have any loved ones around her and her cat has just died. Not seeing any way out of the mess she finds herself in, she decides to end things. Then she finds herself in the aforementioned library, surrounded by books that all contain a version of her life where she made different choices. But before she can delve into those, she has to face The Book of Regrets. For someone who feels so miserable they have chosen to end their life, the Book of Regrets felt like an unnecessarily cruel addition, but there you are.

Nora's first choice is to see what would have happened if she'd stayed with her ex boyfriend and opened a country pub, as was his big dream. Now the trick is that the books don't take you back to the moment you made the choice. They take you back to exactly the same day, exactly the same time. So in each story she is thirtyish and it is the stroke of midnight. Safe to say, the whole boyfriend thing didn't work out in this life either, after which she finds herself back in the library, ready to pick another version of her life.

Now Nora is a pretty special person. Apart from swimming at a very high level until she was a teenager, she also played in a band and wanted to be a geologist. In the library, she finds out that she could have been an Olympic medallist, or a world-famous singer in a relationship with an equally world-famous movie star, or a world famous geologist doing research in Spitsbergen, if she'd pursued any of those ambitions. And that is where the story came apart for me. There is no way that if Nora kept on swimming, she would automatically have become an Olympian. There must have been thousands of variants of the story in which she chooses to keep on swimming and still doesn't achieve much. It would have been so nice to find out she would have had a pretty average life in most cases (which, let's remind ourselves, is still better than the mess she finds herself in now), instead of the fame and glory that she immediately dives into.

Not that those lives turn out to be all that great, mind you. But still, the whole 'reaching the top of your field' angle didn't feel quite right. 

But that is one of the only two minor downsides to the novel. The structure of the novel is neat, with some really short chapters that just contain a single sentence or a single chant interspersed with the 'regular' longer chapters.  Nora is a pretty complicated character, who grows throughout the novel, realising life is more than the choices you make. 

We get to know a variety of people around Nora; her parents, her brother, her friends. We learn how her choices affect them and the choices they make. After living so many lives, Nora starts to see people close to her in a different light, from an elderly neighbour to the young kid she teaches piano. She realises she means something to them, that she influences the way their lives play out, and vice versa. She realises her choices matter, but that the people you live your life with matter more. Without spoiling the ending, which some reviews find too 'happy', I can safely say this book will make you look differently at any missed chances of regrets you may be beating yourself up about. And knowing everything Matt Haig himself has been through, I think he is well equipped to teach us something in that area.