“And he helped out a lot with my childhood.” Stages of that childhood and their unlikely friendship are replayed in flashback fragments. “He wrote songs,” Elisabeth tells a care assistant. Having introduced her two main characters, Smith takes us further into their minds to reveal their shared history and individual fears. Defeated by inane bureaucracy and banter, she heads to a care home, finds Daniel lying in his trance, and sits by his bedside. He cannot process her application because her face is too small in her photo (“you’re wrong in the head”). We cut to Elisabeth, a 32-year-old history of art lecturer, who, while trying to renew her passport, ends up wrestling with an officious post office employee.

Keats died young but Daniel is old in his feverish thoughts he lies washed up on a beach, surrounded by bodies and contemplating his mortality. By the time “Autumn poet” John Keats pops up, we are fully immersed in the nightmarish dreamscape of Daniel Gluck. “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times,” runs the opening line, and for a moment we wonder if Dickens will permeate the proceedings, as he did in Smith’s 2013 book, “Artful.” He turns out to be the first in a chain of literary and cultural references around which Smith’s narrative ebbs and flows. It might sound unseasonal, as if inhabiting another time, but in actual fact it engages acutely and beautifully with topical concerns and perennial issues. Her risk-taking, convention-defying fiction resembles a dizzying high-wire act performed above stiffer competition. As we inch toward spring, a novel titled “Autumn” may seem as inviting as a summer read called “Winter.” But the author is the evergreen Ali Smith, one of Britain’s more innovative writers.

Daniel gluck ali smith