(P.S: blimey, this is lengthy)
“Five years from now, when he eventually tracks down the girl, Florence, now as a young woman, the first thing he’ll do is take it out of his jacket pocket and show her.” 277
(it seems the tense is open to interpretation as to whether it does happen or is wishful inner thought?)
I was thinking in response to @holocene’s comment on the contrast between what the experience of meeting Florence and the events that unfold do to change Richard and Brit - and support systems. What circumstances do the characters meet Florence in?
Richard is about to take his life, a last act of hopelessness (@noahmarcus what you reported from her podcast rings equal with her thought here)
Brit’s portrait is one of someone who is apathetic and follows chance one morning instead of routine. They both work in different kinds of machines (media/film; security/detention) but the first is the one that is humanised in the end: art, story.
What would it take to humanise the machine in the way we might like in Brit’s story ? Is it fair to ask that of her story? I see Brit’s character as relating with existentialist questions of choice and authenticity (the analogy by Camus is it? of the prison guard or SS officer and notions of duty/work)
The last words of the book, " …the new life already at work in it, time’s factory" 336
echo back to Paddy evoking Charles Dickens “But time’s factory’s a secret place” 249
which is followed by “Sometimes we’re lucky. With a bit of help and a bit of luck, we get to be more than the one thing or the nothing that history’d have us be. We’re only here by the grace and the work of others. I am anyway.” Paddy is a ghost from the start, made alive by Ali through Richard.
there’s so much to be said for the threads of the images coming back to have a moral, or some new resonance in this book…The lemon and Richard page 16 versus the lemon he evokes at the end… several allusions to Beatrix Potter (teeth and chocolate with paddy + story and rabbit tail with real daughter)
for the relationship between Tacita Dean as the chosen artist here
Tacita’s work is a lot to do with the image acting as an indexical trace (she has made a point of using analogue film and not digital technologies in her career) - a very ghostly quality: a trace of an icon, the remains of others, of chemicals, of light in passing.
With what Ali Smith is set to accomplish with her seasonal quartet/chronicle, imbuing the spirit and headlines of the time, this sense of an imprint continues.
