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.