British fiction and the time to come (this article is a revised version of a lecture given at Perm State University in September 2018)

I want to suggest in this essay that one can see, across the rage of contemporary British fiction, a fascination with the time to come, and with the means by which a strange and alien futurity might be captured within the snares of literary expression. This absorption in the shape and texture of the future, I think, is determined by two factors – that is, a shifting relationship to the history of form, and the contemporary experience of political transition – factors that are deeply entangled with one another. Political transition itself produces a fixation on futurity. In one of the most chilling moments in Donald Trump’s chilling inauguration speech from 2017, he declares that ‘now we are looking only to the future’ [Trump 2017: np]. Both Trumpism and Brexit, Trump’s ugly European twin, in signalling a quite profound political transformation, point towards a revolutionary future, one which is not aligned to whatever consensuses were built in the west in the decades after the Second World War. The new millennium has projected us into uncharted waters; and our current relation with the history of literary form is a reflection, in part, of this disorientation. Across the range of contemporary imaginative practices, one can see the re-emergence of modernist modes as these are filtered through postmodern forms, as well as resurgent forms of realism, autobiography, metafiction, memoir, and so on. At a moment when the novel is obsessed with its own future, when many of our most prominent novelists and critics are suggesting that the novel itself is dying or dead, there is a strong temptation to retreat into older

forms, to find solace in a return to a modernist mode, or a lyrical realist mode. But I will argue here that the fascination with the novel’s past is also, at this point in the history of the novel, a means of re-imagining its future – that it is the critical re-examination of older forms that allows a generation of novelists writing now to enter into a new political and aesthetic era.

One might glimpse the nature of this fascination, and see too its deployment across the range of British contemporary fiction, by attending to a perhaps surprising symmetry that is discernible between the postmillennial work of Ian McEwan and Ali Smith, a symmetry that arises from a relationship with the commingled spirits of Dickens and of Joyce that both writers share, despite McEwan’s and Smith’s manifold differences from each other both in form and in temperament.

It is in his 2014 work The Children Act that McEwan most fully extends this dialogue with Dickensian realism and Joycean modernism, as a means of imagining the future – the future as manifest, in this novel, in the figure of the child. The opening of McEwan’s novel announces a debt to Dickens:

London. Trinity term one week old. Implacable June weather. Fiona Maye, a High Court judge, at home on Sunday evening, supine on a chaise longue [McEwan 2014a: 1].

This opening ventriloquises the first lines of Dickens’ 1853 novel Bleak House :

London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord

Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather [Dickens 1996: 1].

In sharing its opening with Bleak House in this way, The Children Act announces a kinship with the earlier novel, a kinship which deepens as the novel progresses. Dickens’ great novel stands in part as a rebuke to the law, which becomes barbarous when it is ensnared in its own laborious processes and vested interests rather than serving the interests of the citizens it is designed to protect. The famous figure of Jo the crossing sweeper, in Bleak House, is the closest Dickens comes to a representation of bare life – of a being that does not have the sovereignty granted either by law or by narrative. Jo, as he puts it himself, ‘don’t know nothink’ (235), and is entirely dead to the call of written language, to the discursive signs in which we encode our being. His, the narrator writes, is a ‘wonderfully strange’ being, one which appears human, but which, without language, cannot partake of human time, or human space. How strange, the narrator thinks, ‘to be like Jo’, to shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of the streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language – to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb (236).

Dickens’ project in Bleak House is to imagine a literary means of granting discursive power to the kind of naked being that he discovers in the figure of Jo, without that power becoming corrupted by legal and political institutions which serve their own interests rather than the common good. Standing as a blank opposite to Jo is the despicable lawyer Vholes, a man so versed in the cruel and empty letter of the law that he has almost no body, and certainly no literary soul; he has a surplus of legal language, to counterbalance Jo’s utter lack. And between these opposites is Esther Summerson, whose gentle narrative becoming is an experiment in the process by which a well-balanced and crafted realism can found being in language, and allow for the experience of a fully realised life, at once embodied and discursive.

The Children Act opens with its obeisance to Dickens in part because it, too, is interested in the relationship between law and fiction (which, as McEwan has recently suggested, are ‘rooted in the same ground’), and in particular in the question of how legal or literary forms might grant us the freedom to enter into a future that is at once legally or discursively controlled, and open to our own creative capacities and caprices [McEwan 2014b: np]. ‘The Children Act’ of 1989, after which McEwan’s novel is named, decrees that ‘when a court determines any question with respect to … the upbringing of a child … the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration’ [McEwan 2014a: np], and The Children Act turns around the difficulties and contradictions that this legislation sets in train. As the judge Fiona Maye puts it, ‘the duty of the court was to enable the children to come to adulthood and make their own decisions about the sort of life they wanted to lead’ (38). The law protects the child, and looks after his or her interests, in such a way that maximises his or her capacity to reach an age when they can think for themselves. But the cases that McEwan’s novel is interested in are those in which the rights of the child to self-determination are in conflict with their own wellbeing, in which the law has to set one freedom against another, in order to shape the future that the child will enter. This takes the form, early in the novel, of a case of conjoined twins named Matthew and Mark. Mark is healthy and autonomous, but Matthew cannot live independently, as he has a body that does not function – a damaged brain and a heart that barely squeezes. Here, the law does not simply protect a child’s life, but has to create it, to step in and determine how the narrative of a life is linked to, and written upon, the child’s body. The judge has to decide whether the just course is to separate the twins, or to leave them conjoined. ‘Separating the twins’, Fiona recognises, ‘would be to kill Matthew. Not separating them would, by omission, kill both’ (27). The simple calculus, and the hospital’s wish, is to perform the surgery that separates the twins – as one life spared is better than both lives lost. But the legal case is more demanding. How does the law legitimise the decision to withdraw life from one being, in order to confer it on another; what power is it granting itself when it decides that the experience of sovereignty denied to Dickens’ Jo, the narrative of discrete selfhood, should be granted to one biopolitical assemblage, and not another?

In this early case – and then in the case that forms the central plot of the novel, concerning a young Jehovah’s Witness suffering from leukaemia – Fiona’s judgement is that the law should step in, and shape the child’s future in accordance with its own definition of wellbeing, even if that means prioritising a stronger, more viable subject over a weaker one, or prioritising the decision making power of the adult over that of the child. In the case of the Jehovah’s Witness, named Adam, this involves the legal instruction that Adam’s leukaemia should be treated by blood transfusion, despite the fact that it is against his religious principles to allow ‘blood products’ to ‘enter his body’ (65). As Adam’s father puts it, Adam’s decision to refuse the transfusion is driven by his sense that his biological being is a discrete and sacred gift from God. ‘You have to understand’, the father says, ‘that blood is the essence of what’s human. It’s the soul, it’s life itself’ (75). Adam is nearly old enough to act as an adult, so the law, in requiring him to accept treatment, is imposing its own view of the boundaries of the sovereign being (i.e. it is porous, and thus can accept blood from another body without losing its uniqueness) over those held by the Adam himself. Even though Fiona can see that Adam is lucid and able to think for himself, she cannot accept that his interests are served by allowing him to take a sovereign decision that will end his life. His ‘welfare’, Fiona decrees, invoking the Children Act of 1989, ‘is better served by his love of poetry, by his newly-found passion for the violin, by the exercise of his lively intelligence and the expressions of a playful, affectional nature, and by all of life and love that lie ahead of him’ (123).

In making this judgement, Fiona acts both as an agent of the law, and as a kind of author, a narrator of the life that ‘lies ahead’ for Adam. As Bleak House offers a narrative framework within which characters can come to self-determined being (in which Esther ends up living out the life and love ahead of her in a perfect (but miniature!) duplicate of the Bleak House in which she was brought up by her guardian (891)), Fiona’s judgement offers Adam a benign narrative of life, love and poetry. This granting of a narrative shape to being in time is the gift of realism. But what is most striking about The Children Act, and what makes it such a compelling reflection on the history of form, is that the narrative implicit in Fiona’s judgement – the narrative that has its genesis in the Dickensian opening of the novel – is slowly dismantled as the novel moves through its exquisitely controlled phases. The judgement, coming at the end of act three of this five act drama, marks the climax of a certain realist logic, in which a past generation is able to set the terms in which a future generation comes to language and to being. But from this point on, another logic starts to insinuate itself in the narrative, and with it a completely different model of futurity; and as this other logic begins to surface, so the influence of Dickens begins to give way to the influence of Joyce, and the legacies of realism give way to the legacies of modernism. Fiona’s judgement grants Adam a new lease of life and of health. His body starts to regenerate itself (Fiona admires the ‘whorls of his healthy young dark brown hair’ (167)), and, as Adam writes to Fiona, he recovers his vitality, ‘getting stronger all the time’ (140). Fiona has granted him this strength, this health; but the legal and fictional processes by which one generation makes the space in which the next might flourish are disturbed, in McEwan’s novel, by a certain refusal of narrative sequence. Adam, armed with his new strength, does not want to look forwards for life and love, but rather looks backwards, to Fiona, with whom he has fallen in love; and Fiona, suffering from childlessness and lovelessness, feels herself drawn to the child, not as a member of a future generation which she has set free, but as the extension of her own present, as someone who can give her the love that she half unconsciously craves.

At a critical moment in the second half of the novel, as one temporal logic begins to give way to another, this meeting between generations takes the form of a kiss, nearly a chaste kiss, but also ‘more than a mother might give her grown up son’:

Over in two seconds, perhaps three. Time enough to feel in the softness of his lips that overlay their suppleness, all the years, all the life, that separated her from him. (169)

From this point on, the question that drives McEwan’s novel is how we might capture the years, and the life, that separate one generation from the next, years and life that don’t obey the narrative trajectory of a realist plot, but that lie in the interstices, a kind of lived time that resists our narrative powers; that defies our models of responsibility, of prudence, of sequence; that does not have a language with which to express itself. And as this question comes to the fore, the model upon which it rests is no longer Bleak House, but ‘The Dead’, a text which begins to make itself felt in The Children Act with a vibrant, lyrical intensity. ‘The Dead’ is itself concerned, above all, with the turning of the generations – with the ways in which the dead impose themselves on the living, through the perpetuation of models of community sustained by national myth. Gabriel Conroy’s after-dinner speech, at his Aunt’s Christmas party in Dublin, sets a nostalgic lament for a passing Dublin community against an acknowledgement that there is a coming international generation, which disrupts such forms of belonging. His Aunts are the last bastions, he says, of a ‘tradition of genuine warm-hearted courteous Irish hospitality’, a tradition which is threatened by a ‘new generation’ which is ‘growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles’ [Joyce 1994: 183]. The Irish tradition, which lends the story a rich, festive warmth, is sustained by the folk music that runs through the story, by the strains of the ‘Lass of Aughrim’ that Gabriel finds his wife listening to, with a strange, rapt intensity, at the turn of a staircase. The new generation takes its cue from what Gabriel calls the ‘thought-tormented music’ of Robert Browning’s difficult verse – the prosodic accompaniment to a ‘sceptical and […] a thought-tormented age’ (183). But these oppositions – Ireland versus Europe, tradition versus modernity – are radically upset at the close of the story, as Gabriel misreads the intense, distracted mood that the ‘Lass of Aughrim’ has kindled in his wife, Gretta. He sees that ‘there was colour on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining’, and a ‘sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart’ (191), as the memory of their shared life together, captured in the strains of distant music, is mingled with a surge of present desire for her. He thinks to himself that perhaps ‘her thoughts had been running with his’, that ‘she had felt the impetuous desire that was in him, and then the yielding mood had come on her’ (197). The music, he thinks, has produced in them both a moment of shared belonging, nourished by a collective national mythology. But, as the story comes to a softly crushing end, Gretta reveals that she is moved by the music to recall not the life she shares with Gabriel, but the life that she has not lived, with a delicate boy named Michael Furey, a figure from her past who died for his love of her. The ‘Lass of Aughrim’ has conjured not community, but a great distance between Gretta and Gabriel, between the dead and the living, the past and the future, a distance that yields the story’s closing image, an image which has come to mark the threshold between realism and modernism.1 Gabriel stands at the window, reflecting on the snow falling ‘all over Ireland’, falling ‘on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves’ (202). The imagined prospect of such cold community leads him to a gesture of national belonging, a commitment to that Irish tradition that he (insincerely) celebrated at his Aunts’ party. ‘The time had come’, he thinks, ‘to set out on his journey westward’ (202). But whatever evocation of a shared time and space this homeward, backward journey is, it is of a piece, too, with the difficult futurism of a thought-tormented age. In the very moment that he travels westward, he heads, too, towards an ecstatic dismantling of being that he finds in the broken distance that opens between himself and his wife, a distance which no music can cross, no myth can overcome: ‘His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead’ (203).

To understand the modernism that Joyce invents after Dubliners – to understand how Ulysses produces forms which sustain a mythological and historical past, while opening themselves also to a form of dismantled being, a being that belongs to a future that has not already been made – it is necessary to approach this moment at the end of ‘The Dead’, a moment when a lyrical epiphany brings a commitment to a shared past into contact with a swooning surrender to the groundlessness of being. And it is this moment, this turning to that is a turning away, that animates McEwan’s novel, as he approaches the space that opens between Fiona and Adam, a space between generations that cannot come under the jurisdiction of the law. As McEwan’s novel draws to a close, the elements of ‘The Dead’, which have been gathering under the skin of the narrative throughout its second half, rise to the surface, producing a strangely intense moment of double-voicing. Fiona learns, during a public recital of Bach, and of a Yeats ballad that she had earlier sung with Adam, that Adam’s leukaemia had returned, that having reached his majority he was able to refuse treatment, and that as a result he has died. As Gretta says of her young lover that ‘I think he died for me’ (199), so Fiona discovers that Adam chooses death over the future that she had made for him, the future to which she had propelled him. On her return to the flat that she shares with her estranged husband Jack, Fiona enters into the same unstructured distance that opens between Gabriel and Gretta. As Gabriel feels a closeness to his wife on their return to their room at the end of the evening – as he is overcome, as he puts it, by his ‘clownish lust’ (199) for her – so Jack expects a reconciliation with Fiona after her triumphant recital. He is in an ‘elevated state, excited by her performance, and by what he thought lay ahead’ (206). But rather than sex, which might ‘make everything easy between them once more’ (207), the evening ends in what Fiona thinks of as a ‘great distance’ (208), filled by the spectre of Adam, the ‘very strange and beautiful young man’ (208) who had died for love of her. The novel closes in semi-darkness, with rain rather than snow outside the window, as the ‘great rain-cleansed city beyond the room settled to its softer nocturnal rhythms’ (213), and Fiona and Jack look upon the future of a marriage which will have to accommodate the ghost of a boy who chose, through love, to renounce ‘all of love and life that lay ahead’.

McEwan’s prose summons a modernist forebear, in order to gesture towards a future that is beyond the sequential power of realism to conjure. But his own formal range remains peculiarly narrow – there is a soft dissolution, as the novel moves from its Dickensian opening to its Joycean conclusion, that is delicious to the same extent that it is denied by the well-made realism of the narrative. It is in the work of Ali Smith, and particularly in her seasonal cycle beginning with the novels Autumn and Winter, that one can see an address to the future which is conducted through formal experiment as well as through historical critique, a future which, she has recently argued, is made ‘negotiable’ by the power of fiction [Smith 2018: np]. In these novels, written at speed under the pressure of the passing moment, as if in ‘real time’, Smith seeks to respond to the seismic political upheavals of 2016 and 2017 – the Brexit campaign, Trump’s election, the murder of Jo Cox, the Grenfell fire – producing an almost overwhelmingly vivid picture of the zeitgeist, of a year in which the socio-economic consensus that has held since the Thatcher-Regan era has been suddenly dismantled. The novels offer the first developed fictional depiction of the fever that has gripped the UK since the referendum of June 2016 – in which, as Smith’s narrator puts it, ‘All across the country, there was misery and rejoicing’ (‘All across the country, people looked up Google: what is EU? All across the country, people looked up Google: move to Scotland)’ [Smith 2017: 59]. But, despite this deep investment in the present, both Winter and Autumn suggest that, to understand our current predicament – the peculiar season in which we are living – we need to see it as part of a logic that has been unfolding in the UK since the election of Thatcher in 1979. Theresa May’s denial of the possibility of world citizenship in 2016 is cast as an echo of Thatcher’s own manifesto; we’ve been refusing the larger possibility of community, a character in Autumn says, ‘since Thatcher taught us to be selfish and not just to think but to believe that there’s no such thing as society’ [Smith 2016: 112]. And the timeline of Winter begins, in a sense, with its beautifully evocative depiction of the establishment of the Greenham Common women’s peace camp in the early eighties (‘Come with me now back to an early sunny Saturday morning in September 1981, to a piece of English common land fenced off by the American military in agreement with the British military’ [Smith 2016:143].

Smith’s novels depict a turbulent present, by producing a looping set of histories that locate it, that help us to focus it. But what connects Smith’s cycle, with an almost uncanny insistence, to McEwan’s dramatisation of the contemporary in The Children Act, is that both seek to capture the experience of passing time through an act of ventriloquism, which merges the voice of Dickens with that of Joyce. The Children Act begins by quoting the opening of Bleak House; the beginning of Autumn (‘It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times’ (3)) echoes the famous opening of A Tale of Two Cities (‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ (Dickens, 1998: 7)); and the beginning of Winter (‘God was dead: to begin with’ (3)) echoes the opening of A Christmas Carol (‘Marley was dead, to begin with’ [Dickens 2006: 9]). These opening homages to Dickens then resonate through Smith’s novels, as Bleak House resonates through The Children Act, so one can feel a Dickensian presence in every line, acting as a foundation to the narratives, to the turning of Smith’s seasons. The exploration of revolutionary time in Autumn is impelled by Dickens’ response to the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities – the revolutionary experience that both Dickens and Smith think of as being ‘recalled to life’ [Smith 2016: 213; Dickens 2006: 14]; and Winter is, at its heart, a story of Christmas redemption that works as a retelling of A Christmas Carol. As in The Children Act, however, the legacy of Dickens is interwoven with an equally powerful Joycean bequest. The dazzling opening sequence of Autumn depicts Daniel Gluck, the ancient guru figure who presides over the novel, being reborn on a strip of beach, and as Gluck experiences this Dickensian recall to life, it is impossible not to feel the presence of Ulysses, stirring within the language. With Gluck’s first return to consciousness, as an ‘old man [who] washes up on a shore’ (3), he is inhabited by the figure of the drowned man who floats off the shore throughout Joyce’s novel, the ‘bag of corpesegas sopping in foul brine’ [Joyce 1986: 41], the ‘corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow’ (41); and as he rejuvenates, as his youthful body grows around him and he finds himself standing on a ‘sandy stony strand, the wind distinctly harsh’ (4), he becomes the young Dedalus, ‘walking into eternity along Sandymount strand’ (who is himself composed of ‘dead dust’, of the ‘dead breaths I living breathe’ (42), and who is himself clothed in the ‘strandentwining cable of all flesh’ (32)). Ulysses attends Daniel Gluck’s narrative birth, and then, later in the novel as Gluck finds himself unrequitedly in love with Pauline Boty – the sixties British pop artist who is another of the novel’s guiding figures – it is ‘The Dead’ which offers the framework to Smith’s narrative, that allows the dead to speak. Gluck stands outside Boty’s house, ‘in the rain in the back yard,’ as Michael Furey stands outside Gretta’s house in ‘The Dead’, as Adam stands outside Fiona’s hotel in the rain in The Children Act. As he does so, Gluck thinks to himself that there is a famous short story, The Dead, by James Joyce, in which a young man stands at the back of a house and sings a song on a freezing night to a woman he loves. Then this young man, pining for the woman, dies. He catches a chill in the snow, he dies young. Height of Romanticism! That woman in that story for the rest of her life, has that young man’s song always riddling through her like woodworm (97).

Smith, like McEwan, draws both on a realist and on a modernist tradition, to capture the presence of the past, which is riddled through us like woodworm. But where McEwan stages a gradual move from the former to the latter, allowing a realist conception of duration to dissolve into the Joycean epiphany with which The Children Act ends, Smith’s novel cycle refuses any such linear history of form, offering instead a dizzying blend of ages and styles, crunching Dickens together with Joyce, as well as with a vast range of other influences, voices and images, from Barbara Hepworth, to Pauline Boty, to Elvis, to Paddington Bear. Just as the chronological passage from 2016 to 2017, from Autumn to Winter, is repeatedly disrupted by the appearance of jumbled images and sequences from the past – from Greenham in 1981, or from Christmases past that continually interfere with the unfolding of Christmas present in Winter – so the shifting influences that shape Smith’s narrative are never clearly distinguished from one another, but can be felt jostling against each other in every line. It is as if, for Smith, the experience of this present season, the temporal quality of our own passing moment, does not have a form in which it might be given shape. The past mingles with the present, one voice mingles with another, in a way that defies the protocols of narrative sequence. As Smith’s narrator says – of Daniel Gluck’s regeneration, but also of the writing of Autumn itself – ‘here’s an old story so new that it’s still in the middle of happening, writing itself right now with no knowledge of where or how it will end’ (181).

Now, this shapeless mix of the old and the new, the high and the low, the realist and the modernist, might sound quite familiar, another restaging of the hybridity of formal styles that we associate with postmodernism.¹ As the character Art says, in Winter , this is a familiarity which could become rather wearisome. ‘It is the dregs, really’, he says, ‘to be living in a time’ when it is mandatory to be ‘post-postmodern consciouser-than-thou’ (158). The perennial return of postmodern bricolage might resemble what another character thinks of as the reassuring reappearance of the same Christmas songs every midwinter, which mark ‘the rhythm of passing time, yes, but also, and more so, the return of time in its endless and comforting cycle’ (39). If, as the Dickensian opening of Winter has it, we are surrounded by the signs of cultural as well as ecological death (‘the earth’, we hear, is ‘also dead’ (5)), then this is perhaps because the literary and visual forms with which we have narrated the passing of time – even those postmodern forms which seemed, late last century, to be so revolutionary – have lost their freshness, have become recycled commodities as tinny as the horribly familiar strains of George Michael’s Last Christmas . ‘God was dead: to begin with’ the narrator of Winter says,

And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead (3).

But if Smith’s cycle is concerned with recycling, with the deathly return of the old, the shining of every morning’s sun on Samuel Beckett’s ‘nothing new’, then it is equally invested in the future, in the imperative that we imagine a time to come that has not already been seen, that does not belong to cyclical time, but that glimmers on the other side of a seasonal, temporal threshold, unclothed by any hand-me-down narrative form [Beckett 1973: 5]. Even as her restless investment in the chopped-up histories of narrative form produce a feeling of déjà vu, a reanimation of the ghosts of modernism and of postmodernism, of Dickens and of Joyce, she brings such histories into contact with a futurity, an open narrative horizon, that remakes them, as old stories are always made new just as they are in the middle of happening. What marks Smith’s aesthetic above all, not only in Autumn and Winter but in earlier works, such as How to be Both and The Accidental, is its singular, characteristic attention to the ways in which time inhabits material, the forms which allow a temporal consciousness to act within, to cleave to, the bodies and environments in which it recognises itself. In Autumn, the narrative explores the process by which Gluck’s mind is given rejuvenated form, encased in flesh, or, in one of the novel’s recurring fantasies, in a body of green wood, a flowering pine (echoed in his ‘pining’ for Pauline Boty). In Winter, the fascination with the sculpture of Barbara Hepworth leads to a repeated figuring of body as stone, and the dwelling inside the body as a dwelling inside stone. There is no other contemporary novelist who works with such idiosyncratic precision at the boundary where art meets with its materials (with stone or wood or canvas), or where mind meets with body. When a character in Winter, reflecting on ‘mind, matter, the structure of reality’, thinks that ‘mind and matter are mysterious and, when they come together, bounteous’ (303), he is stating a credo of Smith’s work – her recurrent fascination with ‘meeting’ that runs through her work at least since her 2007 novel Girl Meets Boy. Smith seeks to reveal that junction at which mind meets with matter, at which one person meets with another, and this junction is the place, too, peculiarly fugitive and groundless, where the past meets with the future. The seasons may make this meeting point cyclical, may give a rhythm and a familiarity to the passing of time; indeed Smith is deeply attuned to this rhythm, and to the gathered mythologies that give a history to the transformative contact of old and new. But even as the turning of the seasons accords to such a rhythm, it also thrusts us into a strange flaw in the ‘structure of reality’, a suspended space between the gathered past and the empty future, a space that is ‘like two weather-fronts meeting, like the coming season getting ready midway through the old one to make itself heard’ [Smith 2017: 268].

It is this temporal and material junction, this suspended ground between weather-fronts, that Smith seeks to bring to thought and to form in her novel cycle, and that marks the far limit of the British novel now in its striving to imagine the future. In reaching to the future, Autumn and Winter are guided in part by the spirit of Dickens, and particularly by the spirits that speak in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. It is one of the great gifts of the realist novel, as it is brought to a particular form of perfection by Dickens, that it gives a shape to passing time, and allows us to bring the future into contact with the past. This is the gift that is given to Scrooge by the spirits that visit him on Christmas Eve. ‘I will honour Christmas in my heart’, Scrooge promises at the end of the novel, as he is confronted with the bankruptcy of his own stunted refusal of passing time. ‘I will live in the Past, the Present and the Future. The Spirits of all three shall strive within me’ (77). It is this capacity, to extend oneself in time, that Smith is searching for in her novel cycle, as we look to bridge the gap between the future and the past opened by the revolutions of Trumpism, and of Brexit. Trump declares, in January 2017, that ‘we are looking now only to the future’, that his own revolution requires us to reject the past. Smith’s novels offer a direct rebuke to this address to the future. We need now, like Scrooge, to feel both the future and the past striving within us. Only by working with both imperatives can we see past the current crisis in the passage of world history. But if this is so, what Smith’s cycle suggests – what the British novel now suggests, as it experiments with formal means of imagining the future – is that we need a new mechanism with which to address the turning of the seasons, the passage from shared past to unknown future, from adult to child. Smith takes Theresa May’s declaration, that ‘if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere’, as an epigraph to Winter, and it is difficult to resist the feeling that all the novel’s energies are directed against this sentiment; there must be, Smith’s novel cycle suggests, ways of extending citizenship across the globe, ways of imagining shared worlds, that are not reducible to the hegemony of the west offered by Blair, at the turn of the current century, as a phoney cure to the experience of dispossession. But if Smith’s aesthetics are directed by this urge towards citizenry, towards shared worlds, she also counterintuitively shares something of May’s sentiment here. It may be that, to be a citizen of the world now, we need also to be a citizen of nowhere, the no place that has haunted the novel’s utopian imagination since Thomas More’s 1516 work Utopia. Scrooge feels past, present and future striving within him, and Dickens crafts a literary form that resolves such striving into sequence. Smith, however, suggests that, it is necessary now for us to give expression not only to accommodations between the past and the future, but also to gulfs between them, gulfs that can only be experienced as a kind of nowhere, a wasteland between a shared past and a future that may grow out of our collective past, but which does not belong to it, or follow from it.

It is this attention – to a communal nowhere that, like Zadie Smith’s NW , lies between generations, between the past and the future – that makes Smith’s novel cycle so timely, so attuned to the state of the British novel now. ‘The book was dead’, Smith’s narrator thinks at the opening of Winter, ‘ Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead’ (3). This may be so – it may be the case that the passage from realism to modernism to postmodernism that is reanimated in McEwan and in Smith has led to a postmillennial wasteland, a stony ground in which no roots clutch and no branches grow, and to which we can offer only a heap of broken images. But for Smith and McEwan, and for a generation of British novelists working now, at a transitional moment in the passage of world history, it is only by clearing such a passage, by imagining what it would be to be a citizen of nowhere, that we can craft the forms in which we can look to the future, while feeling our shared past strive within us.