Winter, book review. (Ali Smith)

Everything is dead!
You name it and it’s dead: God is dead, chivalry is dead, Jazz, politics, thought, love, TV, Christmas, Earth, the internet, in fact the only thing that isn’t dead are ghosts.
Sophie wakes one morning in her fifteen bedroom house – Chei Bres – and sees a large floating head, just a head, which gradually transforms into the head of a small child before becoming a lifeless floating stone so, maybe ghosts too are dead?
Art (Arthur), Sophie’s son, is traveling to his mother’s for Christmas but has an issue. Charlotte, his girlfriend – possibly – and he, have fallen out and she’s trashing his Twitter feed, his ‘Art in Nature’ posts, which he just makes up anyway to sound earthy and environmentally conscious, so he needs a plan. His mother is expecting a Charlotte!
Talking of environmentally conscious, Sophie’s estranged sister, Iris, who, decades earlier used to squat in Chei Bres with a group of ecologically minded souls, now lives close-by because, in spite of their dislike for each other she worried when her sister moved to such a remote house – sisterly love in the face of adversity. Maybe not everything is dead!
Although it is supposed to be winter, it is also February when Iris takes Sophie to watch an Elvis movie when they were kids, April when a loved one passes, July when Sophie meets a man she first met at Chei Bres in ‘78 and abscond to Paris to look at art make love and drink coffee – he is Arthur’s father – and it is September, Greenham Common airbase and there’s a protest, and the few become thousands and they encircle the entire perimeter, hand in hand, one of them being Iris and then it’s Christmas eve and Art has arrived, called his aunt as his mother has no food and has to ask his fake girlfriend (Lux) to pretend to be Charlotte!
The crux of this story is love, family ties and how sometimes things get stretched to a point where you’d never believe it possible to pull them back but then, somehow they are, and I suppose, on that basis this book is about, above all else, hope.
Ali Smith’s writing bucks convention (see blogpost 04/09/22 for Spring) but is fluid, and her setting of a scene, her ability to create tension between the sisters, make Art feel unloved but loved, the reader to feel sorrow, anger, fear and joy and wonderment are a testament to her skill as a writer, a skill I feel all should enjoy and so, as bizarre as the above might sound, I’m recommending this to all.
Three and a half stars

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