Review: Spring by Ali Smith

I’m tempted to think of the third instalment of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet as a literary sucker punch. But that does the book a disservice, as it’s so much more than a simple wake up call to the damage and division caused by hate speech and our failure to genuinely connect in the age of social media.

Surely, however, this is the angriest and most bitter of Smith’s works to date, with its attack on the dehumanising apparatus of Britain’s immigration service: the UK Immigration Removal Centres, in which detainees are reduced to ‘deets’ – stripped of all rights and dignity. And, importantly, Spring is also an exercise in how that process  transforms the people who work in such places into machines. And how, in fact, we are all in some way contaminated by that system; by the fact that we live in a society which allows it to happen and engage with media that condone it.

Spring is littered with sections in which the author hurls that sense of social atrophy in our faces: condensing, for example, the hate speech of trolls (together with punctuation issues and typos) to frightening effect:

SHUT UP just shut the fUck Up can someone tape her mouth shut she deserve to be relentlesly abused what a Cunt go and die hang yourself you ugly Cunt we are all having a laugh at you You are a shit show nobody couldn’t play fuck marry kill with you its just Kill you are a Tampon you are odios you deseve to be raped left for dead your Daughter deserves to be raped and stabed to death with a Kitchen KNnife your like a broken record bleeding heart liberal fuck WE know where you Live

Smith, Ali. Spring (Seasonal Quartet) (p. 223). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Painful to  read, these are moments which prove just how normalised such discourse has become. Smith picks apart facile claims to freedom of speech. Language is no longer a system of communication, but a signifier of difference. And while the language of division comes cheaply, our failure to engage in genuine dialogue costs us dearly.

Language, then, is both barrier and bridge, depending on where you stand, as IRC officer Britt discovers, on hearing her fellow worker speak in Gaelic:

For some reason just hearing it made her angry. It made her near tears. It felt like being bullied did, back when she was at school and had to pretend she wasn’t clever. Then Torq made it worse by smiling at her like he really liked her while he made the impossible sounding sounds. Her throat started to hurt like it does when you try to stop yourself crying. It was the language that was making it hurt.

Smith, Ali. Spring (Seasonal Quartet) (p. 326). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Spring also picks up on Smith’s preoccupation with the act of storytelling. “All my work is about books,” she tells Christina Patterson in an interview for The Independent. “It’s all circular and it all comes back to books and what they do.” www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/ali-smith-the-power-and-the-story-226080.   Thus Spring zings along with the intertextual mastery so characteristic of her other work, intertwining its own stories with those of other narratives – such as the (almost) encounter between Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke in 1921, or tales of Scottish history. All of this reinforces the sense that it is narratives which make and break us. But that stories also feed in and off each other – and that in this respect, it is impossible to ever truly end a story. Continually surpassing their boundaries, stories spill into our lives and offer points of resistance and change. And that, at the end of the book, is what perhaps  Spring offers by way of hope.

While Spring can be read by itself, I would recommend reading it alongside Autumn https://wordpress.com/post/katecudahy.wordpress.com/1358 and Winter https://wordpress.com/post/katecudahy.wordpress.com/1292 as this reveals the way in which Smith is pulling a yet larger narrative together in startling and beautiful ways as she works through the seasons. It is also a novel which requires a second reading in order to allow all the hidden quirks and twists to fall into place.

Yet another masterpiece which reinforces Ali Smith’s status as perhaps the greatest writer of her generation.