1. How is the story rooted in autumn? Why do
you think Ali Smith decided to write a quartet of books about the
seasons, the changing of the seasons, and the passing of time? Why did
she start with autumn?
2. How is the book obsessed with time? "Time travel is real. We do it
all the time. Moment to moment, minute to minute" (p. 175).
3. Ali Smith stated in an interview with her British publishers:
The way we live, in time, is made to appear
linear by the chronologies that get applied to our lives by ourselves
and others, starting at birth, ending at death, with a middle where
we’re meant to comply with some or other of life’s usual expectations,
in other words the year to year day to day minute to minute moment to
moment fact of time passing. But we’re time-containers, we hold all our
diachrony, our pasts and our futures (and also the pasts and futures of
all the people who made us and who in turn we’ll help to make) in every
one of our consecutive moments / minutes / days / years, and I wonder if
our real energy, our real history, is cyclic in continuance and at core,
rather than consecutive.
Do you agree with the author that our history
and thus our stories, individual and collective, are cyclical rather
than chronological? Discuss this description of time.
4. The novel proceeds with flashbacks
interspersed with the present rather than in a consecutive,
chronological narrative. Why? And how does this connect with the
author’s view on how we perceive time?
5. Describe the friendship between Elisabeth and Daniel and how it
evolves through time and the novel. How is their relationship at the
heart of the novel? Why does he always ask her, "What are you reading?"
6. How does their friendship revolve around stories, art, and
literature?
7. What is the novel saying about creativity and creating and about
witnessing and experiencing art and literature? And what is the novel
saying about nature and our interactions with it?
8. Describe the relationship of Elisabeth and her mother. How does the
relationship blossom by the end of the novel? Why does it change?
9. In Autumn, what is the importance of art and the human
connections that come out of art and creativity? Give some examples.
10. How is Autumn collage-like and thus similar to the art of
Pauline Boty?
11. Why do you think the author has chosen this real-life artist as a
character and inspiration in this novel? What do Boty and her vision and
art represent for Daniel and Elisabeth and how does she connect to the
themes of Autumn?
12. Continuing with the collage theme, discuss Daniel’s wordplay and
intermixing of college and collage. What do you think of the idea of
college being a collage of different classes and experiences?
13. Why does the book open with a reference to Charles Dickens’s A
Tale of Two Cities, and then there’s a longer reference to a divided
country filled with polarities: "All across the country, people felt
legitimized. All across the country, people felt bereaved and shocked"
(p. 60)? What are the two cities or polarities in the novel?
14. Smith alludes to and mentions many other authors and literary works
as well: William Shakespeare, John Keats, James Joyce, Aldous Huxley,
George Orwell. Discuss them and why they are relevant to this novel.
15. Many reviewers have called this novel the first post-Brexit novel.
What does this mean? How has England changed after the Brexit vote? How
does this tie into the United States’ 2016 election, or does it?
16. Find instances of tree imagery throughout the novel and discuss the
various descriptions. How do the imagery and arboreal allusions connect
with autumn and the changing seasons theme?
17. What is the novel saying about storytelling? "There’s always,
there’ll always be, more story. That’s what story is" (p. 193).
18. Daniel tells Elisabeth, "So, always try to welcome people into the
home of your story" (p. 119). Does this show that our stories don’t
belong to us alone? Do you think this is a call by the author for
inclusion and diversity rather than building fences and keeping people
out?
19. Why doesn’t Daniel tell Elisabeth about his experience during World
War II? "I know nothing, nothing really, about anyone" (p. 171). Can we
ever know everything about another person?
20. How does Autumn fuse the present with the past?
21. What is the importance of politics and the effects of politics on
the layperson in this novel? What does the fence and defying the fence
represent?
22. Both Daniel and Elisabeth’s mother talk about lying to and being
lied to by Daniel: "The power of the lie… Always seductive to the
powerless" (p. 114). Elisabeth’s mother: "I’m tired of people not caring
whether they’re being lied to any more" (p. 57). What are both of them
talking about? And what is the connection of lies and truth in the
novel?
23. On what note, despair or hope, does the novel end and why?
