MARTIN Amis's novel The Information wanders off at one point into the realms of meteorology and climate change: "The weather wasn't great," the narrator observes, "but it was still meant to be summer. Something had gone wrong with summer. But this was England and that's nothing new."
As it happens, there is nothing particularly new about the concept either. Shakespeare, after all, has Tatania in A Midsummer Night's Dream tell us that
The seasons alter; the spring, the summer,
The chiding autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
More interestingly however, Amis goes on to hypothesise that "the four seasons are meant to correspond to the four principle literary genres; that is to say summer, autumn, winter and spring are meant to correspond to tragedy, romance, comedy and satire."
Now there is a captivating thought to me, at any rate. We are used to thinking in this way about music. Vivaldi's Four Seasons, for example, brings to life the effervescence of a new spring, followed by the hot and humid Adagio of high summer; the autumn section hints at wine, women and song in the quiet anticyclonic stillness of an Indian summer, and then the shivers of winter precede the final allegro portraying fun and games on the ice in a chill and boisterous wind. Franz Joseph Haydn, too, chose The Seasons as a theme, describing musically the brash renaissance of the earth from winter, the hot and sultry breezes of midsummer, and the hunting festivals of autumn.
Amis treats the four classic literary genres in a somewhat similar way, and goes on to tell us what exactly corresponds with what; "It's obvious, really," he says. "Once you've got comedy and tragedy right, the others follow."
Summer, by Amis's reckoning, is the season of "romance: journeys, quests, magic, talking animals, damsels in distress". Autumn corresponds to tragedy, being appropriate to "isolation and decline, fatal flaws and falls, and the throes of heroes." Winter personifies satire with its "antiUtopias, inverted worlds, the embrace of the tundra, the embrace of wintry thoughts". And spring, finally, is comedy, with "weddings, apple blossoms, Maypoles, no more misunderstandings - away with the old, on with the new."