Gliff

Ali Smith

Book of the Month: October 2024

Reviewed by Ingrid Brubaker

“It’s a truism of our time that it’ll be the next generation who’ll sort out our increasingly toxic world,” reads the jacket of Ali Smith’s new novel, Gliff. “What would that actually be like?”

With Gliff Smith is moving away – forwards – from showing us how the world we live in looks, to what the world can look like in the future if things go on as they are now. While her Seasonal Quartet novels of 2016-2020 pointed at how Brexit, immigration laws and eventually Covid 19 affected British society, Gliff takes a step into an imagined future of harsh laws and an unempathetic view of both the natural world and human nature.

Briar and their sister Rose are travelling around to keep safe. Their world is one where insects and wildflowers are largely extinct, and the social hierarchy is extreme: they have been deemed “Unverifiable” – a class of people who are somehow troubling to the government and to the status quo of how the world is supposed to be. Briar and Rose’s mother is away working her sister’s job in a hotel. Her partner leaves the children with enough tinned food for a week and promises he’ll return. Soon the siblings are relying on the kindness of strangers to navigate this new world.

It’s a world of fear and uncertainty, and one that is impossible not to compare to our current one. Gliff is a dystopian novel, and the undercurrents of contemporary politics are ever present, and very easy to imagine as real. We don’t have to imagine a world where trans and non-binary people are stripped of rights and dignity, and we don’t have to picture a society where certain people are quick to downgrade someone’s worth as a human based on their background or skin colour. Smith writes about class differences, discrimination and racism with a bluntness and simplicity that describes the fictional world of Gliff in repetitive, categorising language:

“[The Unverifiable] were largely unverifiable because of words. One person here had been unverified for saying out loud that a war was a war when it wasn’t permitted to call it a war. Another had found herself declared unverifiable for writing online that the killing of many people by another people was a genocide. Another had been unverified for defaming the oil conglomerates by saying they were directly responsible for climate catastrophe. Another had been unverified for speaking at a protest about people’s right to protest.”

So this isn’t purely fiction; it’s a list of things people get in trouble for here and now, in our lived world. And this is the magic of Ali Smith: her fiction is rooted so deeply in contemporary Britain, that it is impossible not to read her as a social commentator as well as a novelist, as far as those are possible to disentangle. Smith outlines a version of the future that is scary because it’s so bleak, and even scarier because it feels completely within reach.

Stylistically, Gliff it’s not one of Smith’s easiest reads. Meeting her prose for the first time in this novel could possibly scare new readers away: the novel is simultaneously classic Ali Smith and also something new. While Smith is never a stranger to picking apart the chronological timeline, in Gliff she demands our attention. The narrative jumps back and forth in time – the present is five years later than most of the story, but these parts are all connected through reoccurring imagery, memories from childhood that pop up again and again, and words that are repeated and used with multiple meanings and interpretations. The book is divided into parts subtitled “horse”, “power”, and “lines”, three words that stand alone, but also work together in “horsepower”, “powerlines”, and, if you’re feeling creative, “horsepowerlines”. Reading Smith is like staring at the world through the mirror she’s holding up for you, and at the same time solving word puzzles.

 “Gliff”, for instance, is the name of the horse Briar and Rose rescue from a trip to an abattoir – but it is also defined later in the book as many different things, such as “a short moment”, “a sudden violent blow” or “to look at someone or something in an unheeding or hurried or careless manner”. My favourite definition of the word is: “to glimmer like sudden unanticipated light”. That is truly what Smith’s fiction does, every time – the light her prose brings to a world which, at present feels immensely dark, is always surprising. Within the darkness of Gliff there are also glimmers – gliffs – of joy and warmth, like in the relationship between Briar and Rose, and the beauty and joy they still find in other people and animals. 

Briar and Rose’s mother says to them before she leaves: “If only people paid more attention […] to what history tells us rather than all this endless congratulating ourselves for finding a new way to read it.” Ali Smith’s fiction invites us to do just that.

Gliff is published by Penguin Books.

Ingrid Brubaker is a Norwegian-American PhD student whose work is mainly tethered in literature and ecophilosophy.