Not the Booker: Spring by Ali Smith review – topical but not plausible

Brexit has brought division and anger. Social media companies don’t have our best interests at heart. Refugees are treated appallingly. “Facts” have been undermined. People in power say the the truth is not the truth. Dreadful jokes are made about Muslim women in newspaper columns. And so on.

You don’t need me to tell you any of this stuff. I’m also unsure about how much you’ll gain by hearing it from the writer Sebastian Barry called “Scotland’s Nobel laureate in waiting”.

Alas, there’s a lot of such contemporary material in this third instalment of Ali Smith’s seasons quartet to wade through. Written and published at speed in order to reflect the news almost as it happens, Smith makes no bones about the obviousness of the subjects she’s chosen.

“There’s nothing in here that’s not been said around us,” she’s said. Fair enough, but that doesn’t make it any more interesting. Our present nightmare either bulges out of the main narrative like the proverbial sore thumb, or is served up in breathless, on-the-nose sections taken from the notebooks of a 12-year-old girl:

We want to hire people to attack anyone powerful who says stuff about us that we don’t like, regardless of whether it’s true. We want the black and Latino people who work for us to feel a little less important and protected and able to rise in the company hierarchy …

Perhaps future generations will find these summaries of our current woes more useful – but for now they’re too familiar. The plot, in contrast, suffers from feeling too unreal. We meet Richard, a TV director, standing at a train station and having suicidal thoughts after the death of his long-term collaborator and occasional lover, Paddy. A series of flashbacks and memories – Smith has an impressive ability to skip backwards and forwards through time – show how much of an influence Paddy has been on Richard’s life and how much Richard loved her. It’s touching and gentle; if this were the whole book, there would be little to criticise and plenty to admire.

The trouble arrives when what feels like an entirely separate novel intrudes. We meet Brittany, who works “as a DCO in an IRC for the HO” – which is to say, she helps guard refugees. The IRC is not a prison, as she explains in one of Spring’s many clever lines, but a “purpose-built Immigration Removal Centre with a prison design”.

Brittany is known as Brit, and yes, that’s pretty symbolic. If you’re worrying such signposting is unsubtle, you won’t enjoy how much this point is stretched in lines such as, “[Brit is] nearly two different places … Britain and Brittany”.

This insight comes courtesy of the novel’s weakest link: the aforementioned 12-year-old, Florence, who one day persuades Brit to go to Scotland with her instead of going to work, in a few typically unbelievable exchanges.

Smith has explained that Florence is a character based on Marina in Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Like her Shakespearean forebear, Florence has a near-supernatural ability to persuade people to do the right thing. She is said to have walked “untouched out of a really nasty sex house in Woolwich” in a direct riff on a scene in Pericles. She also spends a lot of time slipping in and out of supposedly locked doors and baffling adults with her uncanny persuasive powers.

Smith instructs us on how to read this material. “The girl is like someone or something in a legend or story,” she tells us, just in case we aren’t sticking with the programme, “the kind of story that on the one hand isn’t really about real life but on the other is the only way you ever really understand anything about real life.”

Whatever you may think about that, Florence’s persuasive powers are almost entirely unconvincing and she never feels true on the page. “What if,” she says. “Instead of saying, this border divides these places. We said, this border unites these places … What if we declared border crossings places where, listen, when you crossed them, you yourself became doubly possible.”

Credit to Smith’s prescience in writing about a powerful child just before Greta Thunberg arrived on the scene. But what a shame she’s written such a patronising approximation of a 12-year-old. It’s a pity that Brit and Florence’s strand derails Richard’s – perhaps their chance meeting and everything that comes after is supposed to feel featherweight, but that doesn’t make all the flimsy whimsy easier to indulge.

It’s arguable that Smith has earned some forbearance. But would we forgive such obvious flaws in a less beloved writer? By the same token, I might perhaps have been easier on this book if it were a debut. There’s enough quality writing to have me applauding a fine talent – but not enough to call Spring a good book.

Spring by Ali Smith is published by Penguin. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on orders over £15.