I love the beginning of this story – it opens with Sophia
chatting to a child’s disembodied head that bobs cheerfully and politely around
her. However, it soon begins to take on a more sinister note, as Sohpia
considers how the head happened to be separated from its body, the head’s
steady tap-tapping on the window when she locks it out and it’s slow morphing
into something else as the face disappears and she finds clumps of hair on her
bedroom pillow.
The presence of Charles Dickens looms large over this book –
Sophia is indeed, a Scrooge type character – a retired businesswoman who now
resides alone in a 15 bedroom house in Cornwall and is referred to her
estranged sister as an ‘old miserly grump’ and Midnight continues to chime over
and over again much to Sophia’s consternation.
She seems to wholesomely dislike her son Art when he
arrives with his pretend girlfriend to celebrate Christmas with her. Art’s day
job involves destroying artists by reporting them to a multinational corporation
for copyright infringement. He also writes a blog on the side, Art in Nature,
which is made of fabricated memories and journeys, and has recently been
commandeered by Charlotte, his ex-girlfriend, with revenge on her mind. Art can’t
tell his mum about his recent break-up so instead picks up Lux, an impoverished
but enlightened Croatian student, at a bus stop and pays her £1000 to accompany
him on his visit to his mum for Christmas.
Lux is the stranger in the midst of this dysfunctional
family who shines a light on the family’s cracks and brings healing during a
Christmas lunch fraught with tension between family members on all different
sides. Lux and Sophia bond over Shakespeare’s late play Cymbeline,
“about a kingdom subsumed in chaos, lies, powermongering, division and a great
deal of poisoning and self-poisoning”, as Sophia observes. “I was telling you
about it because it’s like the people in the play are living in the same world
but separately from each other, like their worlds have somehow become
disjointed or broken off each other’s worlds,” says Lux, referring to her keen
insight into this fractured family before her.
The shadow of Brexit hovers uncomfortably over the whole story and key events in history are highlighted through the activist actions of Sophia’s sister Irena. Ali Smith’s anger is plainly evident concerning the
treatment of immigrants, Brexit the Grenfell fire, Trump, nuclear war, chemical
leaks and climate destruction. However, the overall atmosphere is not bleak.
There is forgiveness, song, love and a kind of comic resolution as Art finds
himself in the midst of angry texts between his mother and aunty – until then
he hadn’t been in touch with is aunt for 20 years. There is also a question left
over the future of Lux. Was she deported? Was she saved? With £1000 in her
pocket we are hopeful for the latter and she can finally finish her literature
degree and help save the country, and perhaps the world.
Above it all is the feeling of Winter…the ticking of the
seasons and the abiding image of the tenacity of nature and light. For me, a
beautiful, generous novel - this second part of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet is
a story of tenderness, righteous anger and a generosity of spirit that leaves
you with a tingle while reading and a great sense of loss once you have
finished the novel
