We had a pretty full house to discuss Autumn by Ali Smith. We found it wasn’t the easiest of reads and took some getting into. The story of the developing friendship between Elisabeth and Daniel Gluck, her elderly neighbour, was well told. While babysitting he was activity teaching her to think more deeply and laterally about the things she was reading and learning. Her attachment to Daniel is shown by her returning as an adult to visit him in hospital towards the end of his life.
While we didn’t all take to the way the author jumped backwards and forwards in time we thought the book was cleverly written and quite literary. The book also has elements of stream of consciousness and chapters which are almost hallucinogenic or dream like. We found it hard to understand why Ali Smith chose to develop some threads, such as Elisabeth’s saga with renewing her passport at the Post Office which made several of us laugh, while discarding others. These threads were peppered into the book as smaller seemingly unrelated chapters which made it feel disjointed and confusing to read at times. The Profumo affair is mentioned as the story progresses through time and we wondered whether the book will stand the test of time as the political scandal fades from public memory.
While we could appreciate the writing it wasn’t our favourite read and we gave it an average marking of 6.4 out of ten.