![]() “Why allow the novel more to be what it says it is, novel?” she once asked. Just as Autumn, the first part of her seasonal quartet, was hailed as the “first Brexit novel” on its publication four months after the referendum, so S ummer – which opens in spring 2020 – is among the first Covid-19 novels. Smith is intensely interested in that “right now”. ![]() A page later, she thinks: “Everything is mask… Everything needs to be unmasked, right now.” The little cotton face coverings people wear today, Sacha reflects, are like “nothing at all, dead leaves, blowaway litter, compared to the real masks, the ones on the faces of the planets’ liars”. ![]() Its yellow beak reminds her of the masks that Venetians wore during the plague. ![]() She contemplates the images of the virus itself (“little planets covered in trumpets”) and the racist rumours that it came from Chinese people eating yellow snakes. ![]() Early on in Ali Smith’s Summer, teenage Sacha is sitting on Brighton seafront when a text from a friend forces her to think about this thing called coronavirus that’s been swirling around the internet. ![]()
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