And summer’s surely really all about an imagined end. We head for it instinctively like it must mean something. We’re always looking for it, looking to it, heading towards it all year, the way a horizon holds the promise of a sunset. We’re always looking for the full open leaf, the open warmth, the promise that we’ll one day soon surely be able to lie back and have summer done to us; one day soon we’ll be treated well by the world. Like there really is a kinder finale and it’s not just possible but assured, there’s a natural harmony that’ll be spread at your feet, unrolled like a sunlit landscape just for you. As if what it was always all about, your time on earth, was the full happy stretch of all the muscles of the body on a warmed patch of grass, one long sweet stem of that grass in the mouth.
Care free.
What a thought.
Summer.

3.5
I did it. I read the Seasonal Quartet one after another, which I think simultaneously acted as a detriment as well as a positive. Come this final instalment, I was quite ready to read something else, read another voice for a while, but, saying that, I still really liked this book.

This was the only book in the series that felt rushed to me, despite supposedly being written in the same period of time as the other books. Smith completed each book six weeks prior to publication, something she stipulated with her publishers before starting this project, and, upon learning this, I was really surprised because the previous books, the first two most certainly, didn't feel rushed. They felt measured, mulled over, and thoroughly thought out, and I wouldn't have been able to tell that they had been written in such a short space of time - however, I could with Summer. Maybe it's just a little too close to home at the moment seeing as how it covers Covid 19 and Lockdown, maybe this is just too present for me right now, but I felt it at times lacked subtlety. One moment in particular really accentuated this issue to me, and it is where one character goes on a tangent about Boris Johnson and his horrendous treatment of the NHS and its staff. I'm agreeing with everything she's saying, I feel the anger searing under my skin - but it's just too...obvious, if that makes sense. It didn't feel like something the character would naturally say but rather as though Smith herself was cracking down a window, hastily exclaiming this at me, and then quickly concealing herself again to continue with the story. It just really thew me.

There was a lot to love in Summer and I wonder if I'll feel differently when I've had more distance from 2020 and haven't been reading each volume of the quartet in quick succession. At the moment, it's my least favourite of the series, Winter being my favourite by a mile, followed by Autumn and then Spring.