The reader is sometimes left puzzled as to when things occur, but that is the magic of Ali’s fiction: her ability to include the reader as an active interpreter of what is actually going on, not just an observer. Other times the effect is bleaker, as when Elisabeth comes across a menacing message reading “Go home”, spray-painted on the walls of a house.Īpart from the lyrical, lucid writing, Ali’s style also seems to travel in time, covering different time periods, seasons and months.

Ali describes some vivid scenes, often with plenty of humour (there is some witty dialogue in a post office, outlining all the tiny details of being approved for a new passport). Set in the post-Brexit era, the issues of immigration, national and ethnic identities, as well as that of borders (not just physical), are prominent. The novel is not all about art and beautiful description though. Daniel, being an art connoisseur himself, shares her enthusiasm for the arts and some of the highlights of this novel, with moments of intellectual beauty, come when the two of them discuss art – be it in gloomy settings or beautiful scenic landscapes. Elisabeth grows up to become an Arts lecturer at a London university. Together they form a lifelong friendship that is deep and thoughtful, not physical at all, but on the verge of being described as platonic.

She first meets with her neighbour, Daniel, back in 1993. “But then again again, a picture taken not long after, in a time when a child just playing in leaves could look, for the first time to the casual eye, like a rounded-up and offed child (it hurts to think it) or maybe also a nuclear after-child, the leaves hanging off her looked like skin become rags, hanging to one side as if skin is nothing but leaves.” From the very first pages this poetry is evident: And when this is combined with her lyrical approach, the effect can be of extravagant beauty. Is this a dream? Life after death? The memories of an old man? Ali’s prose could be described as a contemporary distillment of Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness. He is naked at the beach, a place with hallucinating descriptions that might or might not belong to this world. “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.” So begins Smith’s novel and we don’t know what’s really going on with Daniel Gluck, the protagonist. It’s not easy to blur the line between dreams and illusions, but Ali Smith succeeds effortlessly.

Autumn by ali smith reviews