Ali Smith’s newest offering is about a horse. A horse which is saved from the slaughter by our protagonist’s younger sister, Rose, and named ‘Gliff’, a word which, as protagonist Briar explains, means many things at once. So many meanings that Smith devotes two pages in the novel’s middle to list as many as she can conjure, amongst them “a transient glance. A sudden fright. A faint trace or suggestion.” It’s a word that can mean anything, filling in a multitude of gaps in meaning.
Gliff concerns Briar and Rose finding their way in a dystopian Britain which has branded them as “Unverifiables,” a term which we never fully come to understand but seems to mean they have slipped outside of the political system. Their house, surrounded by a painted red line delineating their outsider status, becomes a refuge for them and the horse, Gliff. Although the book undeniably owes a lot to the dystopian genre, it’s also not densely plotted. It’s a slow and meditative read, focussing on the two protagonists, their trips to the library, and their relationship with a local rebel named Oona, as well as a final portion focused on Briar five years in the future.
Ali Smith’s books are usually deeply grounded in the real, with her recently-completed ‘Seasonal Quartet’ often hailed as the main ‘Brexit novel’. Whilst I might have questions about that label, it does emphasise that her books are anchored in modern Britain, however that manifests itself. Spring, by far my favourite of the quartet, deals with an aging screenwriter processing the death of his close friend, alongside a woman who works for an immigration detention centre who ends up going on a cross-country voyage with a child.
Smith is no stranger to formal experimentation, jumping between timeframes, pulling references from a variety of eras. Her 2014 offering How to be both, is about an artist’s apprentice in Renaissance Italy as well as a teenager in contemporary Brighton. The novel was sold in two versions; one with the Renaissance portion first, one with it second. Despite this, the novel stayed generally realistic in its plot and ideas. Experiments with genre and form are her hallmarks, but Gliff is lighter on that, choosing instead to inhabit the dystopian genre to present less realistic ideas about the exaggerated endpoint of Britain in crisis.
Gliff is a modern dystopia without ever feeling annoying. Its focus on the dangers of AI and the surveillance state is sophisticated and never comes off as Smith taking a blanket position denouncing modern technology. Briar’s fascination with the local library, and the potential of its dictionaries in particular, reveal the novel’s preoccupation with language, alongside the ways it is manipulated and weaponised by those in power.
But at the same time, references to Taylor Swift sit alongside an epigraph by Giorgio Agamben. Smith’s world is sparsely illustrated but richly populated; a slow read, unfurling itself gently over its 273 pages. Go into it expecting a subtle, meditative and (at times) funny dystopia, and you will be rewarded. Next year Smith is following this novel up with Glyph, of which details are sparse but it promises to be a novel hidden in” Gliff.
