“There’s Ways to Survive These Times … and I Think One Way Is the Shape the Telling Takes”: Hostile Environments and Hospitable Connections in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet

With Autumn, the first instalment of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, arriving on the heels of the EU Referendum in 2016, Smith firmly situates her series of networked novels within the present political moment in the UK. This chapter considers how Smith’s quartet of novels published between 2016 and 2020 responds to the political and cultural landscape driven by the British government policy to create a Hostile Environment for illegal migration. As Smith cycles through the seasons, her characters find that such hostilities and anxieties intrude upon even the most ordinary of lives and mundane of moments. Her writing consequently captures the complex, and at times contradictory thoughts and feelings that circulate in response to present-day emergencies, within a Hostile Environment that institutionalises a politics of exclusion. Championing the means via which narrative materialises the world and our manner of being in it, Smith’s novels ultimately aspire towards more hospitable environs and moments of connection. Storytelling, thus, has the capacity to affect change—to extend a gesture of welcome.