New Zealand Listener - November 5, 2016

52 LISTENER NOVEMBER 5 2016

BOOKS&CULTURE

for a silent minute before he said, from

nowhere, “I have been thinking about the

importance to the storyteller of the notion

of hospitality.”

Then, earlier this year, I was reread-

ing Homer’s Odyssey, and the opening

of Autumn riffs on Homer. I realised, as

I was reading, that I was feeling more

and more heartened. At the heart of the

ancient story, repeated like a talisman, is

the demand that we be hospitable, and

the shame of not welcoming a friend,

stranger, family, enemy and everyone who

happens to come and stand at the gate,

to come in, sit down, wash hands and

feet, to have something to eat and drink,

and to tell the story, hear the story, both.

The nature of story is always related to

how we’re constructing our fictions in the

world. And an eye to how we’re con-

structing our fictions tells us about what’s

really happening in the world, what we’re

making of it and what it’s making of us.

You are known for your innovation and skill

with structure and form. In Autumn, multiple

stories layer on and refer to each other. In

short, it felt like the kaleidoscopic experience

of being alive. What attracts you to complex

structures? Why a quartet based on the

seasons? Which season is next?

I’ve wanted to do this for 20 years, and

somehow it felt right to begin this project,

which I’d started to think about back

when I first set out to write, just after I

finished How to Be Both. Among other

things, that novel was concerned with the

dimensional and layered structuring of

time, synchronically and diachronically.

The notion of a quartet was always one

which questions the profound cyclic way

we live – that we are all of our past selves

in any present moment, and are also all of

our future selves, even the ones that may

not happen. And in that present moment

each of us hold all the people who made

us and all the people we’ll in turn go on

to help make. Novels are called novels

because they were always about the new,

about newness, about the news, as it were.

The seasons form us and circle through

us like tree rings. The present moment

hurries us on to the next and the next.

What happens when the two come

together? Something actually lifelike?

Next for me is winter, and Winter. I began

with Autumn so that I’ll be able to end

in Summer, to go out, I hope, on the full

open leaf if time allows.

Some of the novel is set in the 1960s and

tells the story of model Christine Keeler, the

subject of Lewis Morley’s iconic portrait. That

photograph was then reimagined by pop

artist Pauline Boty, as part of her painting

Scandal ‘63. What attracted you to Boty’s

work? Do you see connections between the

political environment of the UK in the 1960s

and today?

I knew from the start that a book about

autumn would be about what (Katherine)

Mansfield calls “the shortness of life”.

Immediately there’s Keats, the lyrical

creator of our literary autumns, the notion

of fruitfulness and the fastness of life, the

gone time, the gone life. And I happened,

quite early on in the process, to see a work

of Boty’s. To look up more of her work,

because of the bright joyous kick-assness

of what she does, and then to read her

life story – she died young, at 28. She

embodied and helped to create the most

astonishing range of new possibilities for

women in the 1960s, in terms of, on the

one hand, joyous expression, and on the

other, analysis of image. Boty developed

the use of the replicated image as the

subject for her art, painstakingly paint-

ing images that proliferated in popular

culture. Looking at her work, I couldn’t

not come across her version of one of

the pivotal political images of the 20th

century in the UK – an image of Christine

Keeler. The scandal was ostensibly about

sex, but really it was about politicians and

parliamentary lying.

As Brexit began to happen around the

writing of this book, I began to shake my

head one more time at the serendipities,

and to thank God that at the heart of this

book there’s an artist who broke down

boundaries and routed clichés in a world-

changing way, pointing out the uses and

abuses of images with every image she

made.

One of the characters in Autumn states, “Life

was what you worked to catch, the intense

happiness of an object slightly set apart from

you.” What makes you

happy in this life?

That’d be telling.

What are you reading?

The Invention of Angela

Carter, by Edmund

Gordon. It’s wonderful. l

AUTUMN, by Ali Smith

(Hamish Hamilton, $34)

by JAMES ROBINS

F

or every aggressively titled popular

history in a bookshop window,

there will be a workmanlike

counterpart propped up on a shelf

inside, humbly dust-jacketed,

approaching its subject with little decorum

or inflammation. New Zealand Society at

War 1914-1918 is one such, praised for its

modesty in the foreword by noted Scottish

historian Hew Strachan, not for capsizing

“accepted wisdom” but for thinking seri-

ously about “areas where there has been

far too little wisdom received”, a senti-

ment I gladly go along with.

In 19 rigorous essays on subjects as

various as charities, newspapers and the

police force, a distinct narrative of the

“Home Front” emerges. At the declaration

of war, New Zealanders, divided as they

were between rural and urban factions,

threw themselves into combat with full

commitment to protecting the Empire.

British unity and British self-sacrifice

were elevated as all-consuming edicts.

Called up to defend Pax Britannica, New

Zealanders chorused in full voice. This is

common knowledge, and the consensus is

noted by most of the contributors.

The book becomes most valuable when

Fraying

extremes

Life on the “Home

Front” during WWI

is examined in rich

detail in 19 essays.

Communities bound

by intense solidarity

began to shatter under

exorbitant living costs.