A school writing assignment designed to encourage dialogue between neighbours is completed rather unconventionally.
So begins Ali Smith’s novel Autumn, launching themes about story-making, people-knowing, and norm-questioning. It is the mid-1990s, and eight-year-old Elisabeth Demand writes her paper without interviewing her neighbour, septuagenarian Daniel Gluck, because her mother is uncomfortable with the transgressions of privacy and propriety inherent in the assignment. She bribes Elisabeth into writing a fake interview, asserting that ‘The real news is always made up anyway’. When Elisabeth and Daniel do meet later, Daniel says: ‘The lifelong friends, we sometimes wait a lifetime for them’, and their unconventional relationship shepherds Elisabeth through the ‘old/new’ struggles of the human condition in the decades that follow.
Transforming power of story
Autumn is in part a story about the power of stories to inform and transform. ‘What are you reading?’ Daniel asks throughout the novel. Stories about Utopian and dys-topian visions (The Tempest, Brave New World), unrequited love (Apollo and Ariadne, Narcissus and Echo, Michael Furey in Joyce’s The Dead), and transformation (a variation of O’Henry’s The Last Leaf, a selection from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and a children’s novel, Clockwork) provide timbre for Autumn’s own thematic strains.
The ‘old/new’ of literature is the ‘old/new’ of life. It is seasonal and historical. Opening with a paraphrase of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, the novel closes in 2017 with British society divided over the referendum on membership of the EU. The narrative is not conventionally linear, however.
Suspicion
Chapters later, Elisabeth echoes Two Cities again: ‘All across the country, there was misery and rejoicing’ as a prelude to a scathing Dickensian litany. Situated between these allusions, Brave New World is evoked as Elisabeth is confronted with bureaucratic silliness while attempting to renew her passport. The clerk says her name is not spelled ‘the normal way’ and that it’s ‘people from other countries that spell it like that’. When Elisabeth asks ‘about facial recognition technology’, she figures she’s become a ‘suspect’. A time gap is bridged by the similarity of Elisabeth’s experience to one Daniel recalls in a later chapter.
It was 1932, Daniel was 16 and he and his younger sister were taking a train ride. He remembers being viewed suspiciously by other passengers who ‘can see from his clothes that he’s not from here’. They ‘don’t know the first thing about them’ and they discuss ‘the necessity of developing a scientific and legal means of gauging exactly who’s what’.
People-knowing
People-knowing is difficult for friends as well as foes. Elisabeth discovers that Daniel has told a hospital care assistant (she later realises that she ‘hasn’t encountered a single care assistant here who isn’t from somewhere else in the world’) details about his Holocaust experience that he’s never shared with her. She wistfully concludes: ‘I know nothing, nothing really, about anyone. Maybe nobody does.’ Yet in a different context Daniel tells Elisabeth: ‘We have to hope that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters.’
Immigration and Goldilocks
Stories can engage us in or distance us from knowing others truly. Daniel argues that the story maker must exercise choice in order to combat the ‘made-up version of [truth] that we get told about the world’. His unconventional telling of the Goldilocks tale(s) deconstructs the belief that stories are ‘set in stone’. With obvious reference to problems with immigration, Daniel and Elisabeth decide that Goldilocks may be told in a way that gives her the benefit of the doubt regarding her bad behaviour, or as evidence ‘that all Goldilockses are [vandals]’.
Autumn’s storyteller does not espouse a Christian understanding of truth, and she has chosen agnosticism or atheism for her protagonists’ theological stances. Biblical language suggests a messianic role for Daniel and an alternative gospel in his aesthetic. Elisabeth is Daniel’s artistic disciple, and ‘the pupil of [his] eye’. Forbidden by her mother from seeing Daniel, Elisabeth soon disobeys because ‘by the morning of the third day I knew for the first time that one day I would die’. She is certain that ‘when Daniel comes, he’ll know a way’ to transform her disappointment. People awash in scandalous ‘news [that] right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff’ crowd him excitedly, then turn on him with comments ‘more and more unpleasant’ about ‘his ability to change things’.
Jesus the storyteller
Jesus, the Word made flesh, tells stories. He knows what is in people’s hearts, and his unconventional message is foolishness or a stumbling block to made-up versions of the truth. His word informs and transforms. It is the new ‘old, old story’ of the beloved hymn. His parable of the Good Shepherd excludes the false shepherds who would harm his sheep, and includes ‘other sheep that are not of this fold’, which he will also rescue ‘so there will be one flock, one shepherd’. And people-knowing? ‘I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.’ In the end, Daniel, there is much more that matters.
