Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet: A Meditation on Renewal

The story of the broken and the mended may be the most widespread of all the stories we tell. A great many works of religion, literature, and political thought begin with what the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanners calls the "immemorial misdirection" of life. We begin with a sense that we are lost, fallen, darkened, broken, wondering how we have so lost our bearings, and we seek a way of reorientation, recovery, renewal, reconciliation. It is as though the experience of breaking were our primordial condition, the art of repair our primordial vocation. Ali Smith's seasonal quartet -- Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer, a sequence of novels published one after the other, at one year intervals between 2016 and 2020 -- is not only a representation of British life in our time but, above all, a meditation on renewal.