Book Review - Autumn

5. Autumn, Ali Smith.

A fairly young woman visits very old Mr Gluck in the Home. He probably hasn’t got long. Or has he? He's got a long time to think about. The book consists of brief chapters of shifting planes of memory overlapping each other, gradually forming a whole picture. There are images of spiritually infused pasts, abstract hints of an anxious future and also snaps of a mundane present context, with Elisabeth the slightly grumpy part time lecturer going to and from the care home, pausing occasionally to Deal With Her Mother. Elisabeth quite likes her mum, but hasn't had much to do with her lately.

The big relationship is the unlikely one between Elisabeth and Daniel, her former neighbour: between her curiosity and his generosity, a mutually rewarding one. The key section seemed assured and real, the lead up and down less so. There are plenty of calmly brilliant sentences and nice character observations of the minor players. There are about half a dozen Lists. Yawn. There are tacking-ins of Brexit-induced fears and other social commentary. A micro-biography of Pauline Boty could well have been critical to Elisabeth’s perspective, but equally she (brightly burning forgotten pop art heroine) could have been an ardent project of the author who felt that she had to be given a stage, and coincidentally chose this book.

The whole thing deemed to be a bit too obviously message-ey which made me sneer a bit. However it's perhaps a question of Time. Dickens, Ovid and others (all referenced in various ways in the text) don’t induce that reaction, although they preach a lot too. It’s pretty brief, so maybe that’s also my problem: I don’t mind a bit of practical philosophy or even a sermon, but the licence to deliver those to me is more than 250 pages. I'm possibly waiting for all four of these Seasons to come together at one time, instead of a single segment.

Slaughterhouse 5 - discussion questions for Book Groups

S5 discussion q's

who is Kilgore Trout?

"so it goes", a religious incantation to accompany death. Perhaps a reflex to avoid horror. Is this how religious ritual gets going?  Who's doing the avoiding in this case? KV, the reader, society?

Is the whole book a jazzed up therapy act for KV? You can see how the pieces are all like fragmented memories and recollections, probably whiskey-driven late at night. Is it literature (in the sense of being a deliberate work made of text) or is is something like a mental patient's artwork, astounding and healing yet not quite art? Do you even buy the OR in the last sentence? We could replace with AND, and then talk about why it's both healing and artful. 

Trafalmadorians see all of time in a deep, holistic, mode. Does a sense of deep time mean that nothing is anybody's fault? "The moments are just structured that way, and things are as they are. We never worry about such things". 

Nothing, well how about some things? So, turning the dial down a bit, is morality a function of timescale? A evil act this afternoon (killing a person) could turn out to be the right thing to do in a year. A year's atrocity (bombing cities) defensible over a century. What evil would we tolerate to improve life over a millennium?

Are there moral decisions that are independent of the passage of time? Questions involving the verb To BE rather than those including To DO?

Does Buddhism, say, differ from Christianity on moral issues because of its time structure? Cyclic/holistic rather than Linear/atomic. 

Would you like to be a Trafalmadorian specimen?  Advantages: No job, plenty to eat, can prance around naked, have sex with other excellent specimens, make small talk with the keepers. Or would you wish to get back to your real life?

They were rather obtrusive, had obvious spaceships, got involved with their captives, made worrying remarks about causality, and so forth. Perhaps they were just learning their craft. How do you know that you aren't already in the hands of the rather more competent Crypto-Trafalmadorians?  If so, what sort of real life could you wish to get back to?