In recent years Ali Smith has mastered a style that is both disconcerting and utterly humane. Her Seasonal Quartet – a novel for each season, published between 2016 and 2020 – considered the worst of contemporary British society, including rising xenophobia and the fallout of Brexit, the immigration detention system and lack of political interest in the climate crisis. Smith tackles these horrors with art: Shakespeare, Pauline Boty, Katherine Mansfield and Charlie Chaplin fill the pages of these books, lending warmth and hope to the chilly political landscape.
This model continues in Gliff, apparently the first in an interconnected pair that will be followed next year by Glyph. Our narrator is Briar, approximately 13, and of indeterminate gender. They and their younger sister, Rose, are being looked after by Leif, their mother’s boyfriend, while their mother is away covering a hotel job for their ill aunt. One day they return home to find someone has painted a red line around the perimeter of their house. They flee in a camper van, spending the night in a supermarket car park. But when they wake up, they see another red line, this time painted around the van. Leif takes Briar and Rose to an empty house, leaves them with 42 tins of food, and promises he’ll be back.
He doesn’t return. In the meantime Rose develops an affinity for the horses kept in a nearby field. When she learns the animals are destined for the abattoir, she frees them, keeping one, which she leads into the house. Rose calls the horse Gliff. “What does it mean, the word?” Briar asks. “I don’t know, she said. That’s why I like it.”
Briar and Rose are both immensely likeable characters. Briar is smart for their age, yet at times pleasingly childish: “I was surprised by a behemoth not actually being a kind of moth,” they think. When Briar realises they don’t have their passports, Rose doesn’t understand the problem: “Yeah but a passport doesn’t prove we’re us, she said. We prove a passport’s it.” The child’s confidence is both moral and physical: “She did a pirouette back up the fence, up and over it, and landed on her feet on the other side.”
Gliff is unendingly playful. Even in her 18th book, Smith does not tire of the wonder of language. It is also her most damning critique of Big Tech yet. As the novel develops, it is clear that the red lines – painted by people pushing lawnmower-like machines named “supera bounders” – designate the homes of “unverifiables”.
In this dystopia – as ever, not too far away from our reality – unverifiables are people who dare to speak out against the system. The state, via local “Designated Data Collector slash Strangers”, stores information on all the citizens they can. Smith’s breathless, comma-less list of what comprises this information spans over a page: “Your date of birth your place of birth your ethnicity your gender your sexuality your religion your postcode your latest blood test figures… which toothpaste you use and why.” The state then “removes” anyone it deems inappropriate – and cracks down on those who have avoided data collection. Through flashbacks, we learn that Briar and Rose’s mother blew the whistle on the dishonest weedkiller conglomerate at which she worked.
Briar and Rose find allies. With Gliff the horse they move into an old school building where a group of fellow unverifiables live. Hanging in the hall is a picture of a “white horse in front of a cave” that they are told is by a painter named Stubbs (unnamed in the novel, it is likely the 1770 work Horse Frightened by a Lion). A new friend tells them it is based on a Roman statue that “is meant to be an allegory for accepting your own defeat as inevitable, and accepting it gracefully”. “Pff” is Rose’s response. Later Smith makes one brief reference to Pegasus, “the horse whose name became synonymous with mass spyware, the legendary one, with the wings”.
The meaning and meaninglessness of our words is an overarching theme of Smith’s oeuvre. In Gliff it becomes a major concern, as, through flash-forwards that take us deeper into this dystopia, we learn that the power of that word – “Gliff” – will forge a link between Briar and Rose, across time and in spite of distance and tragedy. The word is not totally meaningless. The author provides us with a list of definitions, ranging from “a short moment” and “a transient glance” to “a wink of sleep” and “a synonym for spliff”. After all, as Smith makes clear in this typically far-reaching and mind-expanding book, the true meaning of a word is made by those who use it.
Gliff
Ali Smith
Hamish Hamilton, 288pp, £18.99
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This article appears in the 30 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, American Horror Story