50 LISTENER NOVEMBER 5 2016
Books & Culture
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A
utumn is Ali Smith’s new
novel and the first in a
quartet of stand-alone yet
interconnected books based
on the seasons. The novel
follows the relationship
between bedridden, century-
old Daniel and his friend Elisabeth, a
young academic in her thirties. It’s 2016,
and as the UK grapples with a historic ref-
erendum, the characters try to understand
the “bordered and exclusive” country they
live in, and “what richness and worth are,
what harvest means”.
Smith was born in Inverness, Scotland.
She has published five short story collec-
tions and eight novels. Her novel How to
Be Both was shortlisted for the 2014 Man
Booker Prize and won the Goldsmiths
Prize 2014 and the 2015 Baileys’ Women’sPrize for Fiction. In short, she’s a power-
house of contemporary literature.Autumn is a remarkable novel. There’s always
breathing space for a reader in your work – it’s
wonderful. So, I’m starting with what I found
the most moving in Autumn, which is your
depiction of love. There’s such hopefulness in
these situations that do not follow traditional
love narratives. Was this one of the goals of the
novel, to give hope?
I love that you think there’s breathing
space for a reader, because if there’s any
aim I’ve got in writing, it’s to make pos-
sible the kind of inclusion that means a
reader isn’t left out of, or led by the nose
through, or simply left on the surface of, a
book. It’s exciting to me, as a reader, to be
asked to be part of the process of a book,
so you might say one of myliterary aims, my literary hopes, is inclu-
sion, in exactly that physical and mindful
and not always easy or comforting way.
Hope and love: they aren’t clichés, they’re
necessities. They’re shape-shifters. They
take the many shapes that we do, and the
multifarious possibilities.
As for what makes you want to tell a
story, it’s not politics, it’s story itself. Not
that story isn’t political. It is, deeply, and
in a clarifying way it’s about how things
work in the very real world. But if you’re
writing and you ask a story to be political,
it’ll just laugh at you. Story arises from
the dialogue, the coming together of the
characters or the language that makes it,
and nothing else, really.One theme in Autumn is how we create stories
and the cyclic nature of story. What do you see
as the power of story? Do some stories return,
like the seasons, to be harvested? In one
conversation about truth, Daniel convinces
Elisabeth to have a generous imagination.
How can we be generous with our stories?
I think story is naturally generous. It is
a hearing and a listening combined into
one act, even if the voice of the story is
silent, even if no one’s physically there
to hear. It’s always a welcoming in. It’s
always a dialogue, even in the absence of
reply, and it always implies that there’s
something beyond the self; all the arts
open the self to the world and to others.
I saw John Berger speaking last year at
the British Library, and someone asked
him what he thought about the millions
of human beings looking for a place to
call home now that the homes they’d
had were in ruins. He sat and thoughtStories of our lives
For inveterate reinventor of the novel form Ali Smith, writing always
comes down to the story, and her latest is remarkable. by SARAH JANE BARNETT
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