National treasure (she’ll love that:-/) Ali Smith has developed a style so original and successful we can now describe something as Ali Smithian and assume readers will know what to expect. A bewitching mood half-way between the everyday and illusion; intoxicating flights of imagination; an effortless combination of pathos and humour. A word-playing mystery as mind-bending as it is heart-thumping.
Winter, however, is a disaster, failing to deliver on every level.
Nah, just joking. It’s a joy. Yes, another one.
After a cute little nod to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Smith introduces us to Sophia, a cantankerous sexagenarian who is being stalked by the disembodied head of a young child. The head is described so simply and naturally that its constant presence quickly seems entirely normal, rather like that of a needy pup. It follows her around as she irritably prepares for the visit of her son, nature writer Art (nice name), and his girlfriend on Christmas day
Her extraordinary gift for linguistic playfulness, alongside the quirks in her conversational free-style, are key to Smith’s Sparky magic.
There are many writers who aim to write light-shining contemporary novels while casting an unbroken spell of poetic profundity comparable to Smith’s. Fearful of the jarring awkwardness of believable dialogue, and the ugly vocabulary of technology, slang and social media, they regularly duck out of acknowledging both. They also often avoid giving characters names, because names have a habit of grounding a story in time and place.
Smith, however, incorporates such elements without ever spoiling the hypnotic effect of her dreamy mood. Painterly descriptions of bejewelled winter landscapes and lyrical, wordy passages conjuring fantasy and myth flow effortlessly into frustrating encounters with admin-fixated bank managers, disheartening google searches and fake tweets. (She even includes a witty, pretty parody of the bon mot-ridden sentimental ‘wisdom-through-experience’ journey readers might expect from a literary novel called Winter; the platitudinous one Sophia would like to star in, but Smith would never write.)
