Gliff

Gliff #1

by Ali Smith, Merete Alfsen (Translator)

En gang i nær fremtid kommer to barn hjem og får se en nymalt, rød strek rundt huset sitt. Hva betyr det?

Det er opplest og vedtatt at det er neste generasjon som må leve med og ordne opp i vår stadig giftigere verden. Hvordan blir det, egentlig? Når samfunnet er fiendtlig og verden er delt, når noen er innenfor og andre utenfor - hvordan kan motstand og opprør komme til uttrykk? Hva kan vi holde fast i og søke trøst hos, og hva har en hest med alt dette å gjøre?

Gliff er en roman om hvordan vi skaper mening og gjøres meningsløse. Ali Smith skriver fengslende om menneskeverd i en umenneskeliggjørende stat og om det mangfoldige og oppløftende som finnes i språket, i naturen og i fellesskapet.

Genres: Fiction, Dystopia, Literary Fiction, Science Fiction, Audiobook, Contemporary, Book Club

238 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 2024

About the author

Ali Smith is a writer, born in Inverness, Scotland, to working-class parents. She was raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at Aberdeen, and then at Cambridge, for a Ph.D. that was never finished. In a 2004 interview with writing magazine Mslexia, she talked briefly about the difficulty of becoming ill with chronic fatigue syndrome for a year and how it forced her to give up her job as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde to focus on what she really wanted to do: writing. She has been with her partner Sarah Wood for 17 years and dedicates all her books to her.

Reviews

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

ali smith is always up to something weird.

like percival everett's JAMES, this is a retelling(ish) of a classic i really didn't like that i think did a better job.

this takes on BRAVE NEW WORLD, which i found to be kind of basic and silly and also very misogynistic, and makes it more relevant to our times (with only some basic- and silliness), and therefore scarier, and realer.

it gives the reader more to chew on, both at the writing and at the thematic level.

i am very impressed and excited we'll be getting more.

bottom line: once again i am rewarded for my unpopular opinions.

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Because if you aren’t unsettled, then there’ll be no sublime.’

Am I a person or am I just a stack of algorithmic data in a trench coat? And if ‘data is the new oil’ as data science entrepreneur Clive Humby said, are my consumer habits worth more than my humanity as corporate donations increasingly give CEOs unfettered access to politicians? Showing how the gap is rapidly shrinking between what was once far-flung futures in the cautionary sci-fi tales of yesteryears and our daily anxious present—almost as fast as the financial gap between rich and poor is widening—comes Gliff, Ali Smith’s first novel since her outstanding Seasonal Quartet. Full of razor-sharp social criticism and rebellious sentiments that skillfully balance the personal and political, Smith is as poetically profound and engaging as ever through her sagacious wit and wordplay. Gliff hits close to home, and hard. Set just a stone’s throw away from our present, Smith takes us through her bleakly portrayed ‘brave new unlibraried world’ alongside young siblings Briar and Rose (their joint namesake of Sleeping Beauty playfully nudging the notion on having to “get woke” and their burgeoning revolutionary praxis) left on their own in an unfamiliar town as they witness firsthand the horrors of society sliding into authoritarianism and sweeping out the unwanted. The unhoused, immigrants, whistleblowers, protestors and more all find themselves labeled “Unverifiables” and sought for arrest in this near-future that feels a natural step from Smith’s previous Brexit novels. Language, and the political and corporate erasure of co-opting of it, takes center stage in the world of Gliff where your data places you into oppressive government categories that defines your life. This story of siblings on the run with a stolen horse through a surveillance society isn’t quite a dystopian novel, yet is eerily prescient nonetheless and Gliff becomes a brave new world (as well as a riff on the famous novel by Aldous Huxley) and scathing examination on our present culture of online data, nationalistic fear mongering, and corporate control. It is heart wrenching yet encouraging as Smith guides us to consider the meaning of words consider freedom and how we ascribe meaning to our existence, shows how hope is found in defying authority and asks us to consider the ills of society in hopes we can ‘solve it by salving it.’

‘Every classic old horse story I’ve ever chanced upon in this brave new unlibraried world deals with the bloodiness of humanity to other creatures as well as each other and more often than not ends in dutiful sadness as if the story, not totally broken, is at least broken in.’

Always the linguistic maestro, Smith demonstrates how language truly is ‘the tool of the tools,’ as sociologist Lev Vygotsky wrote, to find logical footholds in reality to understand, assess, and communicate the world around us. Yet, if ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world,’ as Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, how does one combat an authoritarian society that stifles language, bans books and public education, co-opts the words of resistance, gives a corporate rebranding to terms, and removes the language to speak out? Such questions are a common theme for Smith, who recently addressed this in an article for The Guardian about the Sacco Gang:

‘Truth doesn’t stop being truth and justice doesn’t stop being justice just because powerful people or politics or institutions tell lies.’

Yet what avenues for truth and resistance are available when a corporate police State controls the meaning of words at will and their legal application such as in Gliff? When, say, an industry plant uses the government office to restrict the speech of private citizens, such as cowering from democratic congressional procedure to sign an executive order against fact checking or educating about misinformation.

‘Why do you think they call it a net? Why do you think they call it a web?’

In Smith’s novel Summer, it is questioned if such control of language can even limit our imaginations and actions. Charlotte, an optimistic young activist responds:

‘it depends what you can imagine. And that does tend to depend on the Zeitgeist of the time, and who and what are influencing a mass imagination.’

Smith takes dead aim at corporate social media—think Elon Musk using Twitter to manipulate algorithms to bolster right wing rhetoric—and they way average citizens become the product in marketing manipulation. Briar (or Bri) and Rose’s mother warns them away from the internet and the pitfalls of online propaganda:

‘Social media could do all sorts of good things but that too many people—and more, too many powerful systems—used it vindictively.’

In their present society, all people have a sort of Smartwatch that tracks their every move, people go around questioning each other and entering in their data, cameras and microphones lurk on every corner amassing endless surveillance and data. It is what social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff coined as ‘Instrumentarianism’ in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:

‘[Instrumentarianism is] the social relations that orient the puppet masters to human experience as surveillance capital wields the machines to transform us into means to others’ market ends.’

Or, simply put, power to monitor, manipulate, predict, and profit off what you can and can’t see or experience online. Zuboff warns that this push from tech companies along with increasingly getting into bed with government financially and through government contracts (typically surveillance) is leading to a government ruled by tech profits and full social surveillance in every aspect of our lives. Public and private, which has already occurred at the onset of this novel.

‘God help me, what can one woman do against the behemoth…’

‘There are different realities,’ their mother says, ‘and the net is a reality with designs on general reality, and I’ll prefer it if you both experience the real realities as your foremost realities.’ While Briar may try to defend technological advances, such as AI allowing us to read scrolls that would otherwise ‘fall apart if you tried to open them into nothing but ashes,’ the mother replies we should all pay more attention ‘to what history tells us rather than all this endless congratulating ourselves for finding a new way to read it.’ She considers smartphones to be ‘liabilities,’ causing you to see the world ‘through it’ and not the real world (Mary Oliver would love this detail) which has marked the children as outsiders and threatening curiosity to everyone else. It makes for some of the most charming moments in the book, particularly with Rose—headstrong and charismatic—and the local boy Colon who views questioning people as his honorable duty. The siblings refusal to provide straightforward answers are less a look at deception and more a rather comedic gap in the general sense of the world and how to live within it. There is often a fine line between lies and storytelling and the latter, particularly with Rose, becomes a way to brush aside the veneer of State framing and see the mechanisms underneath.

‘Were we in our worded world the ones who were truly deluded about where and what we believed about all the things we had words for?.’

What is marketing but storytelling, and fiction, especially rebellious fiction full of social criticisms, is a way to counteract the corporate narrative. Smith once worked as an advertising copywriter and her books frequently lampoons the language of marketing as a method for control, such as in Girl Meets Boy when a company polluting the river that is the only source of water spins language to turn the public opinion on the local water protectors into terrorists. She discusses in an interview with NPR about how the term “slogan” is connected to the English word “slughorn” from the Gaelix “sluggern” or “war cry.” It is essentially a corporate battle cry. But fiction allows us to subvert their narratives, as she explains:

‘There is a kind of truth that can't be said any other way. I think it finds a way to say the things which are either inarticulable or being stopped from being said or are very, very, very difficult to articulate. I love that about fiction. It is ever, ever hopeful, regardless of its sometimes very dark subject matter.’

This is a dark novel indeed, but one that is full of hope. Those in power know nothing of hope, only profits, and the characters find fighting for a future where ‘people can be free of being made to be what data says they are’ is a hopeful outlook.

‘Does it make it easier to control other creatures, or even peoples, us deciding that because we don’t know what they’re saying, what they’re saying doesn’t get to mean anything, or that they don’t get to have a say?’

Gliff exists in the slide to a dystopia of sorts, though the mechanisms of authoritarianism are at a remove from the narrative and are only glimpsed through their effect on people and society. Smith centers humanity, and focusing on the human hurt and human narrative being ground down by dehumanization only serves to emphasize the cold inhumanity of authoritarianism. With discussions on whistleblowers vanishing and deregulations helping a weed-killer corporation lie about their ingredients, cover up their harm, and continue unimpeded, Smith suggests this is an authoritarian rule where the line between corporations and the State has dissolved. It is what Anne Applebaum terms the titular Autocracy, Inc. where instead of one strongman dictator we have a more corporate authoritarianism:

‘An agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power…[through] sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structure, a complex of security service…and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation.’

It is a system that ‘structures much of their collaboration as for-profit ventures.’ Sort of like that online joke I often think about featuring a tech company eagerly announcing they’ve finally invented “The Torment Nexus” from a sci-fi author’s cautionary novel “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.” In a present Right from the start, Smith highlights how the social class divide has gotten to an extreme where the rich and powerful no longer even see the poor. ‘It was like they all had their backs to me, even the ones facing me,’ Bri observes, ‘their disconnect was what elegant meant.’ In this dystopia corporations are shoving down our throats, poverty is conflated with an absence of patriotism, to be outside the profit mechanisms of the elite is to be a blight on the nation, and so language comes in to erase these people such as the re-education “ARCs” where those confined are referred to as “animals.” And it is through the examinations of language where Smith really shines.

‘Weeds are just flowers or plants that people have decided to call weeds because people decide they don’t want them there.’

Words and the control of their meaning are central to Gliff and Rose bantering with Bri saying ‘You are bullying me with words longer than the length of my life’ becomes an overall theme about society. A person can suddenly become termed “Unverifiable” and taken to re-education labor camps and in a ‘worded world’ where you are your data you are easily erasable. And what is a name but ‘another word for ownership’ (elbows Ayn Rand in the ribs for her Anthem novel championing “freedom” ending with the man naming the woman). The character arcs are not unlike a lesson in semiotics, one where they must realize a word points to a thing but is not the thing. Rose argues a passport doesn’t prove she’s her, ‘we prove a passport’s it.’ Bri considers how a former pet existed independent of its name:

‘So there was the word that made the name, and there was the dog that it conjured in the mind, and there, way beyond it, totally free of it himself, was the real dog, wagging or not wagging his tail. It was me who was tethered to the word.’

And then there is the issue of naming the horse, the titular Gliff of the novel, and Bri considers ‘was a horse more lost to the world, because of no words, or was the horse more found—or even founded—in the world because of no words?’ There is an excellent moment in the novel when Bri learns the term “polysemous” while discovering Rose has given the horse a name ‘ that can stand in for, or represent, any other word, any word that exists. Or ever existed.’ It is a possible path to freedom.

‘Because of what you called him, he can be everything and anything. And at the same time his name can mean nothing at all. It’s like you’ve both named him and let him be completely meaning-free!’

One can be erased, but there is also a sense that one can escape the confines of State categorization and data sets. Or eluding categorization such as the rather well integrated aspect on Bri existing outside the socially-enforced idea of gender binaries. When asked ‘are you a boy or a girl’ they reply ‘Yes I am’ and are warned that is ‘either very brave of you or very stupid, given recent developments in history.’ Though not existing in defined meaning is a double-edged sword, such as late in the novel when Bri must learn ‘what power can do…the artistry and the discipline it takes to humiliate,’ and face experiences where ‘words first ceased to mean and where, for words, I first ceased to mean too.’ The power of the State, the power of patriarchy, and the power of cruelty knows no humanity.

‘A lot of people are threatened by knowing that people who they think aren’t anything like them exist.’

I swear this novel is hopeful. In life, hope arrives from defying authority, where small but visible acts of defiance show the system is not impenetrable. We see how when you fight for the oppressed, those in power treat you like the oppressed, but in such a society ‘to be innocent in the eyes of the State is to be guilty’ as journalist Chris Hedges said in a recent speech at the Workers Strike Back conference. You will live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension but you must also stand against them, even in small ways such as Bri discovering that theory is words that can be used against you but praxis, like toppling the eviction machine over and destroying property, signals hope. And that legality and morality are often not congruous as the marketing would have us believe. Smith has always had a fiery undercurrent of resistance and it feels all the more direct and dire here.

‘The person he turned into a mound of nothing but rubble, nothing but smoke and ask, is the opposite of destroyed.
His opponent is everywhere.
His opponent is everything.’

I have such a deep love for the work of Ali Smith and Gliff is another wonderful work. With a sharp aim at social ills, abuses of power, the hatred and fear that leads to control, oppression and erasure, and that language is often at the center of political manipulation, Smith shows how storytelling can wrestle back control of the narrative and praxis breeds hope. Smith has promised a ‘sister novel’ next year, Glyph, which will ‘tell a story hidden in the first novel,’ though she won’t say much about it as she mentioned in a recent interview: ‘If I do, the unwritten book will run off like a creature in the wild that's seen me see it.’ I can’t wait for the book to emerge from the wild and onto bookshelves. Gliff is a marvelous and nuanced book full of linguistic brilliance, a stern warning for the present, and a desperate hope for the future.

4.5/5

‘Wait for me, you little revolutionary.’

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ali Smith’s compelling vision of a not-too-distant future builds on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World but in doing so interrogates, and deftly dismantles, Huxley’s anthropocentric, male-centred perspective. Smith’s narrative’s rooted, if not in the now, in the almost-now, a world whose features closely resemble those of contemporary Britain. It’s primarily presented by Briar or Bri a trans/non-binary teenager looking back at events that totally changed their life. These events unfolded during Bri’s early teens when they lived with their mother, her partner Leif and younger sister Rose. A family emergency led first to their mother’s, and then Leif’s, departure abroad, leaving Bri and Rose in hiding. Like so many of Smith’s protagonists, Bri and Rose are outsiders. Here part of groupings labelled deviant or disruptive by their wider society. Everywhere they go, they’re literally marked out as other - specially-designed machines circling their homes with red paint. They’re known as the Unverified, non-persons who’ve evaded compulsory classificatory systems or those whose origins or actions are deemed aberrant: always in danger of being hunted down via the digital surveillance technologies central to their society’s elaborate control and containment mechanisms. As in Huxley, technology's a key concern.

But, unlike Huxley’s, the structure of Smith’s authoritarian society’s hazy, lacking specificity, gleaned only through its direct impact on individuals like Bri – perhaps because so much of Smith’s setting reconfigures aspects of our crisis-ridden present it’s relatively easy to fill in the blanks. The division between the haves and have-nots is recognisably stark. The wealthy live in a state of oblivion so marked they seem more like figures in a still-life than flesh-and-blood creatures: reliant on a vast underclass to service their needs. These lesser beings are expected to submit to their fate. Anyone who doesn’t can be forcibly dispatched to draconian, re-education facilities - not unlike Huxley’s conditioning centres – or simply disappeared. But the majority willingly submit, becoming complicit in monitoring and disciplining their fellows: often rendered more compliant through drugs in ways that mirror the opioid crisis. Bri and Rose are different, homeschooled by their mother, they’ve been brought up with books not screens, expected to be questioning, to value direct experience over digital substitutions.

Left to their own devices, Rose and Bri encounter a small herd of horses earmarked for the local abattoir, and Rose forms a bond with a grey she calls Gliff. Smith uses Gliff to explore possibilities for kinship and connection which allow for the acceptance of difference and unknowability; opening up questions of speciesism, relations between human and non-human. All of which gradually intersects with an exploration of issues around climate change, environmental blight, and the destructive power of global conglomerates. As in earlier works, Smith’s vigorously critiquing contemporary capitalism: its precarity and inhumane work practices; the dangerous sweatshops and gruelling production lines that feed its rampant consumerism. But she’s also interested in themes around transience, moments of monumental change not dissimilar to the move from the pre-industrial to industrial societies; the flow of history, directions taken, directions that might still be possible. Although Bri and Rose’s future appears bleak, there are glimpses of light, pockets of resistance in the form of organisations like The Campions. The faint chance that fluidity might overcome fixity and conformity.

In comparison to other Smith novels, Gliff’s less explicitly formally innovative. It’s a lot more accessible, less intricate, more linear, more direct. But it’s quintessentially Smith in its themes and preoccupations, with a renewed emphasis on storytelling as a force for change. Smith’s narrative's rife with her trademark wordplay, intertextuality, and multiplicity of influences. There are direct and indirect references taken from art and art history; and to the work of writers like Alan Garner, Max Frisch, and H. G. Wells. Fragmented episodes owe a debt to Orwell’s dystopian narrative as much as to Huxley’s. Imagery and symbolism from mythology, fairy lore and fairy tales surfaces throughout. Bri and Rose’s names stem from an ancient folk ballad but equally conjure “Little Briar Rose” – the Grimms’ telling of “Sleeping Beauty”; and the pre-Raphaelite “Briar Rose” cycle. Here Briar Rose’s unaccountably awake yet surrounded by sleepwalkers incapable of comprehending reality’s perils. Smith’s political analysis could be a tad obvious at times; and the digital versus analogue debates didn’t quite work for me – felt uncomfortably close to Luddite. But I found her central characters sympathetic and was increasingly bound up in their plight. This has a satisfying ending but not a conclusive one, there’s a second instalment to follow – I’m excited to find out where that will lead.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Hamish Hamilton for an ARC

[Doug · Rating 5 out of 5]

Profound thank you thank you thank you to Netgalley and Knopf/Pantheon for the ARC!

A new Ali Smith is always cause for celebration - and much like her compatriots Deborah Levy and Rachel Cusk, I always find her works challenging, intellectually dense, and often enigmatic (sometimes even inscrutably incomprehensible) - but in the BEST of all possible ways. Such an immense pleasure to immerse oneself in her gorgeous, playful, elliptical prose and imaginative storytelling. So it is with this latest tome, her first since her magnificent Seasonal Quartet + Companion Piece.

This, the first in a duology, leaves many questions unanswered, that may or may not become clearer when the other volume (Glyph) comes out a year from now- but this gives one more than enough to contemplate till that happens. After finishing it, I immediately went back to the beginning and began reading it again - yes, it's THAT kind of book.

To be utterly reductive, it's a dystopian novel, set in the very near future, and is for the most part (till the very end) narrated by a non-binary character named Briar (aka Bri and Brice), looking back from some years down the road (and an even more formidable future), to a time when they were thirteen and they and their sister Rose became separated from their mother, due to some sinister shenanigans of the current totalitarian political regime.

They are left to fend for themselves for the most part, and it is when Rose becomes enamored of a horse scheduled for the abattoir, whom she names Gliff, that their bleak existence finds focus and purpose. For fear of spoilers, I will leave things there - but cannot wait to continue the story as soon as part two becomes available.

I have heard that Smith, after being shortlisted for the Booker four times without winning, instructs her publisher to no longer submit her work - which is a shame as this would certainly make the 2025 longlist ... at the very least.

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every Ali Smith is my favorite Ali Smith, and I still have a way to go in her oeuvre. GLIFF is a near future speculative novel, an imaginative mix of wordsmithing (word ”smith” ing) and dystopian, domestic drama. Home, family, abandonment, class shaming and system ostracization are potent and pervasive. Plot is secondary. Word meanings are meant, for the protagonists, to resist a totalitarian Britain, and is perhaps the best weapon against the country’s extremes of surveillance, exclusion, and next-level canceling.

Two siblings, Briar and Rose, are young teens caring for each other in a strange house in an unfamiliar city. A red line of paint was drawn around their family house, which is a signal for imminent destruction. It also means the family are “unverifiables,” i.e. marginalized, cast out of society. Their working mother has disappeared, and their thoughtful, kind stepfather takes steps to protect them by secluding them away from home. The mood, atmosphere, and pace create a ratcheting up of paranoia. I had no idea what would unfold from page to page.

Smith’s world-building is astonishing. She’s so fluid, with subtle inclusions and “word” building that is worth discussion. Highly interpretive with some grounding themes of displacement and shunning, and be prepared for inherent violence. GLIFF is a treat for the reader that enjoys wordplay, absurdity that invokes madness and heartbreak.

What is a gliff? There’s a page-and-a-half to describe the various meanings, and also refers to a horse. The readers should discover on their own.

“Like there was such a thing as a family of words, one that stretched across different lnguages all touching on each other, hitting or striking each other, acting on each other, influencing each other, agreeing with each other or throwing each other out, disturbing each other, doing all of these things at once.”

[Henk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Feels like Handmaids Tale and Peter Pan meet Aldous Huxley's Brave New World with some added horse representation. Two siblings are unmoored in future dystopian Britain.
Because if you aren’t unsettled, then there’ll be no sublime.

There is a lot going on in Gliff, while it is a book of less than 300 pages. Starting of with Leif who is taking care of two children, unrelated to him, while their mother is working in an art hotel to keep the job of a sick aunt. Food is scarce and the girls abandoning their home and living on food in tins. Red lines are drawn around houses and camper vans, showing hostility to the girls. There are Adult Retraining Centres, or arks, as in Noah and Child Retraining Centres, or circuses. The mother turns out to be a corporate whistleblower at a company that resembles Bayer, and then we get to meet some abattoir horses, with a grey one christened Gliff by the younger sibling Rose. Also there are hints of a grassroots resistance and temporary sanctuary.

The lines that are painted around things are juxtaposed with the creative acts of cave paintings, that feature horses prominently as well. We have children being educated by their smartwatch and microphone and video surveillance everywhere, on the lookout for UVs, unverifiables.
The power of language and how it can serve as a conduit for control is very much topic of the book as well, with a library opening up a world for the main character.

In a way the whole dystopian setting is not particularly well explained or innovative, but Ali Smith her writing works because of the brilliance of the narrative voice she imbues the young Bri/Briar/Alan with, who narrates the story. The care and irritation for the younger sibling is so well portrayed, the uncertainty of being left on one's own without adults. There are also harrowing scenes of what is done to children who are forced to work to recycle batteries, including (sexual) abuse of undocumented people. Child labour and horrific wounds caused by this on nimble hands.
Overall the almost fable like quality helped me enjoy this novel despite light world-building.
I am curious how Glyph, the to be published counter volume to this book, will turn-out to be!

Quotes:
It was like they all had their backs to me, even the ones facing me.
Their disconnect was what elegant meant.
Like something vital had been withdrawn from them, for its own protection maybe? maybe surgically, the withdrawal of the too-much-life from people who could afford it by people masked and smelling of cleanness inserting the cannula in a clinic, its reassuring medical smell, one after the other the perfect family offering an arm.

She started singing the words snake it off, snake it off, to the tune of the old song called Shake It Off.

Do you believe me?
I’ll reserve judgement for now if you don’t mind and tell you later in our relationship, I said.

Why are they trying to render us so temporary?

I’m from now, he said. I belong.

Yeah but that’s okay, I said. Family can be more things than people say it is.

Sometime I think you’re a very old and wise person disguised as you, I said.

What do we do?
What we can, I said.

That at least in my dreams I still have a word I can keep

[Bruce Katz · Rating 4 out of 5]

”What gliff means: a short moment. A momentary resemblance. A sudden or chance view. A transient glance. A sudden fright. A faint trace or suggestion. An inkling. A wink of sleep. A slight attack or touch of illness. A whiff. A puff. A sudden perceptible smell. A sudden passing sensation either of pain or of pleasure. A scare. A shock. A thrill. A sudden violent blow. A wallop. A nonsense word. A misspelling for glyph. A substitute word for any word. A synonym for spliff. A postejaculatory sex act. A mood someone’s partner gets in when they miss their partner too much and get upset about it. An organization that works for drug abuse prevention in Vienna. A brand name for an early AI tech tool used in the development of healthcare. A character in something called Ninjago. A rumour. An impulse. An instant. An unexpected view of something that startles you. A state of nervous disposition.”

"Gliff" is also the name given to a horse in the book.


It’s dark, this new book by Ali Smith. Her usual wordplay is here — lots of it — but a pall hovers over everything. A cloud of unknowing.

The world in which the novel is set feels familiar enough. It’s England. People consult Google Maps to get from one place to another. They walk without ever lifting their eyes from their smartphones, respond compulsively to “every little baby chicken automated cheep they make.” The internet is here. Chanel stores. Gucci stores. Nike stores. The Beatles. Taylor Swift. A disease that caused a lockdown, which, when it was over, led to people behaving very badly in theaters and other public spaces.

It’s not quite our world, though. Not yet, at least. Take smart watches, for example. In "Gliff" they’re called “educators.” Remarkable devices that can do so many things: Heart rate, bloods, steps, nutritional breakdown of what you’re eating, internet everything, camera, phone. Transform voice to text. Instantaneous translation but only forty languages (next model up more expensive does one hundred and thirty). Stream anything streamable. Tell the time.

It also automatically films everything the wearer does, sees, and hears. And as for the educative function, well... Smith doesn't need to spell it out.

The main characters of the novel are a pair of adolescent siblings named Bri -- for Briar -- and Rose. They were named after a song not the fairy tale, we are told. Probably for a reason. (I wonder if Smith was referring to the song "Briar Rose" by Aoife O'Donovan with lyrics that include lines like this: "Take it like a man, do what you can, while you can. Try not to scream." Or maybe there's another Briar Rose song that Google didn't kick up.) Bri, the elder of the two, is the book's narrator. The two have a normal relationship: they bicker and tease one another like all siblings of that age, and they are remarkably smart, particularly Bri.

The book's opening lines signal that something is off: “Our mother came down to the docking gate to say cheerio to us. For a moment I didn’t recognize her. I thought she was just a woman working at the hotel… she was wearing clothes so unlike her and so not quite right for her shape that it took me that moment to work out they were her sister’s work clothes. Lots of questions raised by this. It's not quite as forthright in its oddity as the clocks striking thirteen in 1984, but the bit about not recognizing her own mother, her mother wearing the wrong clothing...

Bri and Rose leave the hotel in the company of their mother's partner, Leif. They make their way back to the place that once was their home. The yard has changed, however. It's more rough-hewn. And there’s a bright red line encircling the house. The paint is still wet. Recognizing immediately that something is amiss, Leif takes Bri and Rose to a “safe house” so he can go back to find their mother. He leaves them cash for food and says he'll be back. Leif won’t come back. Nor does their mother. (I reveal nothing of consequence in saying this. It all happens pretty early in the book.)

In time Bri and Rose will be obliged to leave the safe house and set out on a journey into this new world. (Interestingly, typographical variations of the words BRAVE NEW WORLD recur frequently in the book, light a neon sign with broken lights.) England is a full-bore surveillance state. There are cameras everywhere and hidden microphones. Lots of other things have red paint around them, it turns out, marking them as somehow tainted -- like quarantine signs painted on doors in earlier days. The buildings are targeted for demolition.

People are seen as tainted too. Lots of them, in fact. In “Gliff” they are called “unverifiable.” Bri and Rose will encounter many them in their journey. Interact with them. We get a partial sense of what the "unverifiable" designation means when Bri and Rose are obliged to seek shelter with them.”They 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. The ferals [i.e., abandoned children] had been marked unverifiable simply because nobody knew what had happened to their adults and it couldn’t be proved who they were. Unverifiable unverifiable unverifiable.

“Unverifiables” are sent to “Adult Retraining Centres” when they are discovered. Arks, they’re called for short. “As in Noah.” (“The people in them weren’t really people. They were animals.”). There are centers for children too. Late in the novel we see the very grim consequences of being assigned to such places.

It's through Bri's eyes that we experience the world of “Gliff.” Walk the streets of their city, run from danger, drop off the grid. And then... In its broad strokes, it must be acknowledged, this is all standard stuff for dystopian fiction. But "Gliff" is no potboiler. The tone is decidedly literary. Definitely more George Orwell than Suzanne Collins. The story is told in a manner that feels almost dreamlike: As if a haze of some sort, a gauze, descends over the action from time to time. (I'll be interested to learn whether others have this feeling.) Each part of the narrative reveals another piece of information about this new England. We are strangers to this world, we readers, obliged to try to make sense of what we’re seeing, fill in gaps. Smith gives us glimpses into the society of this England. The power structure. Although the particulars of the place are hidden, however, we know pretty well what it is we are seeing. The story picks up more and more momentum as we read, and then... well, I'm going to leave this alone. Spoilers, you know.

This being an Ali Smith novel, words — as a category — play a key part in the story. In an environment where reality and language are defined by the authorities, being mindful of the “true” meaning of words can be a liability: “Were we in our worded world,” Bri wonders, “the ones who were truly deluded about where and what we believed about all the things we had words for?”

This being an Ali Smith novel — I repeat, adjusting my point of view — language also becomes a plaything, a source of humor. Sometimes the siblings joust with words (“You are bullying me with words longer than the length of my life,” Rose says. Elsewhere, Bri thinks “no way was I going to break into our cash for something as dilettante as breakfast.”) One of my favorite parts of the book occurs when they meet a young boy named Colon. At first, Bri and Rose wonder if the boy is mistaken, that his name is really Colin.

But no:

Why are you both exchanging looks with each other? Colon said. Is your name really Colon? I said. He spelled it. It really was. Who called you that? Everyone calls me it. My father. My brother. Have you got a little brother called Semi? my sister said. Or are you named after an ancestor’s intestines? He looked bewildered. Is your second name Ization? my sister said. I laughed. I couldn’t not. My sister looked pleased again. But I was suddenly filled with bad feeling, like he’d think I was laughing at him, that we were being patronizing or unpleasant to him.

Yes, “Gliff” is dark. Smith is clearly anxious and angry about where we seem to be heading. Not unremittingly so. I can’t say the story itself breaks entirely new ground. But the novel works on several levels. Even as the plot draws the reader in, the manner of its telling adds depth to the story. It's a very different creature from Smith's "Seasonal Quartet" but the lines between those earlier books and this are evident. "Gliff," it seems to me, is the world that grew out of the events taking place in the Quartet.

Smith plans to release a sequel to “Gliff” that is to be called “Glyph.” I have no idea where the book will take us but I am very eager to read it.

My thanks to Pantheon Books and Edelweiss for providing a digital ARC in return for an honest review.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

What gliff means:
a short moment. A momentary resemblance. A sudden or chance view. A transient glance. A sudden fright. A faint trace or suggestion. An inkling. A wink of sleep. A slight attack or touch of illness. A whiff. A puff. A sudden perceptible smell. A sudden passing sensation either of pain or of pleasure. A scare. A shock. A thrill. A sudden violent blow. A wallop. A nonsense word. A misspelling for glyph. A substitute word for any word...

This week I was at Foyles for an event celebrating the Weatherglass Novella Prize, which Ali Smith judged. At one point during the event she expressed her horror of blurbs on books which inevitably, to sell the book, have to tell you something about the story and the setting. In her view the reader should enter a book relatively blind other than the information the author has chosen to give them (cover, title, epigraphs) and puzzle out what the book is about for themselves.

And pre-publication adverts for signed copies of Gliff from booksellers all come with this description of Gliff, and the companion novel Glyph due in 2025:

The two books will form a new step in Ali’s writing journey, different in form and feeling from the Seasonal Quartet (plus Companion piece) and will look very different too. Ali always keeps her novels under wraps until they are finished, and the surprise of reading a book only when it is complete, knowing almost nothing of its content, is part of the magic.

So, reading an Advanced Review Copy of the novel as I did, courtesy of the publisher via Netgalley, I won't spoil the magic - and simply say - it is indeed both different and truly magical. And yet I suspect the real surprises of this novel (and a 5th star) will only emerge, even to the author, once Glyph is published.


A Horse Frightened by a Lion (1770), George Stubbs

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

In many of Ali Smith’s works, especially her short stories, the genders of characters are unknown, as if Smith is challenging our assumptions or saying it doesn’t (shouldn’t) matter: People are people. In Gliff, though, gender identity develops into a major plot point. Smith’s trademark wise child Rose refers to her sibling as they. Their name is Briar; they’re also called Bri; at one juncture they give their name as Brice. They’re asked by a young antagonist if they’re a boy or a girl: Their response is yes. (I'm outlining this because some readers seemed to have missed it.) The most harrowing part of the novel is when they are picked up as an “unverifiable,” mocked, abused, and then in the words of Bri: “They told me what they’d decided I was.” Chilling.

In the usual Ali Smith-ambiguous way, she doesn’t say why the unnamed country has deemed certain people “unverified.” It doesn’t matter why. If someone can be unverified, anyone can. All it takes is the painting of a red ring around a house or a campervan or a person to instill fear.

As a longtime reader of Ali Smith, I find her works comforting even though her topics aren’t. And the topic of this is so very close to our very soon-now that it’s far from comforting. But there’s something about Smith’s prose (including her purposeful wordplay) and how she wields it that makes me feel I’m in the mind of a wise person (she is) seeing the good in spite of the bad. We still have to maneuver through the darkness and some of us won’t survive, but there will always be a gleam.

This book works as a standalone, but it’s intriguing to know that its companion Glyph is forthcoming.

[JimZ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very readable book. At times unsettling. Always a pervasive feeling of something bad is going to happen, and indeed that was quite often the case.

What was unsettling for me was that I read this in one sitting on the day that Donald Trump and Vice-President J.D. Vance ganged up on President Zelenskyy of Ukraine in the White House. Shocking enough by itself but if one looks at all of the changes in the United States in the last five weeks since Trump’s inauguration.... aye-yi-yi. It's like the dystopian world I was reading about in the book was happening that day (and in the prior month), in real time.

The novel was about two children, Bri and Rose, some other characters, and a horse named Gliff. Gliff is primarily a Scottish word meaning ‘to look quickly, glance’ as well as ‘a brief moment’ or. ‘a sudden fright’. Bri and Rose were UVs. UVs were ‘unverifiables’. As far as I can tell ‘unverifiables’ was never explicitly defined in the book but I think Bri and Rose (and at the beginning of the novel her mother and the mother’s live-in boyfriend) were undocumented immigrants. They were unwanted, they were watched and reported on. Defaming the oil conglomerates by saying that they were directly responsible for climate catastrophe rendered one an unverifiable. Speaking at a protest about people’s right to protest...

I thought the novel was very good. It sadly enough was certainly prescient on the day that I read it. Perhaps that is one reason that I am giving it such a high rating. ☹

Note:
• Ali Smith has said there will be another novel that follows this named ‘Glyph’ (homophone for the name of this novel). According to her publisher, this book and Glyph will “belong together”, which suggests to me that they are interconnected.

Reviews:
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
• https://www.bookpage.com/reviews/glif...
• https://bookmunch.wordpress.com/2024/...
• https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/gl...

[Ari Levine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ali Smith reinvents the dystopian novel, carefully building a near-future Britain that feels both banal and horrifying with subtlety and indirection. Briar and Rose are adolescent siblings left to fend for themselves in an unfamiliar provincial town after their whistleblowing activist mother and her partner are caught up in a neoliberal techno-oligarchic nightmare of re-education centers for "unverifiables" who resist digital surveillance, algorithmic sorting, corporate hegemony, and environmental degradation.

Having been raised to read dead-tree books rather than interact with screens ("educators") and to distrust authority, they exist on the margins of society, evading machines that paint ominous red circles around the residences of dissidents. Insufficiently aware of the ominous political danger they're risking, they find joy and freedom in taking care of a horse destined for the abattoir, and join a community of squatters living-of in an abandoned school. Several years later, we find Bri working as a supervisor in a parody of an Amazon warehouse staffed by corporate slaves with missing fingers, and reconnecting with someone who once knew Rose, and ponders the dissolution and separation of their family.

Smith perfectly captures the freshness, know-it-all-ness, and inquisitiveness of her young narrator's thought processes, and suffuses their musings with her usual dense and allusive wordplay. Beyond the all-too-real dystopian worldbuilding, I was slightly concerned that Smith has been over-working the same thematic ground, since the characters' sermons upon her regular themes of freedom, art, and beauty sometimes felt reduplicative of the loopy monologues from her Seasonal Trilogy and How to Be Both.

Thanks to Netgalley and Pantheon Books for giving me an ARC of this in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.
(UK release date: October 31, 2024; US release date February 4, 2025)

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have become steadily more critical of dystopian literary fiction over the years, a tendency that began during the 2016 Dystopia Keyword Project. Reading Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions this year just accelerated it. Possibly only Ali Smith can publish dystopian literary fiction in 2024 without me critiquing it at essay length. Her prose is so beautiful that Gliff works as a portrait of near-future surveillance capitalism, seen via two homeless kids who makes friends with a horse. The novel is named after the horse, who is a wonderfully vivid character. The dystopian elements are disquieting and well-observed, that classic slight exaggeration of today's cruelties. I did not find Gliff as powerful as Smith's truly magnificent Seasonal Quartet, but it was still a pleasure to read. I will remember it fondly as 'the horse novel'.

[Antonio Luis · Rating 5 out of 5]

⭐⭐⭐⭐✨

Auténtica Ali Smith, tiene todo su estilo característico en una presentación muy sencilla que permite deleitarse en su juego maravillosamente polisémico, como ella misma afirma respecto al nombre que le da título, inaprensible.
Leer a Ali Smith te oxigena.
Siempre es estimulante.

Y, como siempre, comprometida y actual.
Esta vez en un futuro distópico muy realista y perfectamente delineado con muy pocas pinceladas, y con apenas una persona protagonista que puede ser cualquier cosa y todo a la vez. Y su hermana. Ali Smith retrata perfectamente este mundo posible solo desde la perspectiva de lo que se ve, con Bri, protagonista, y de lo que no se ve, con su hermana, Rose.

Que haya sido lectura conjunta le ha dado un plus de valoración, por las opiniones compartidas, los juegos de palabras y las pesquisas sobre identidad.
Y un final abierto con ganas de saber mucho más.

[Taste_in_Books · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 🌟

Finished it and felt I didn't get enough out of it, so I promptly started reading it again 😃

It's a more fulfilling read second time around and gets really powerful towards the end.

Unlike her seasonal quartet, I couldn't decipher all the themes highlighted in this book but what I could clearly pick out was the discourse about the advent and detriment of AI and extreme digitisation that our world is currently being taken over by.

The categorisation of people according to origin, race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, and even ability/disability is to nullify human freedom. Humans are deemed verifiable or non verifiable according to these categories. Oh, and there's also the word "genocide" mentioned once, hinting at the current crisis!! Brownie points for that !!

Ali Smith sets the story a few years into the future and makes two young teenage siblings our protagonists. Hence, putting the onus and hopes on our youth. Handing over the reins to the future generation to wipe out the "data" and press "Restart."

[Matthew Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

83rd book of 2024.

3.5. Better than the quartet and Companion Piece. Full of all the usual Smithian wordplay and strange humour and outsiders, but now in the future. Brave new world. Brave old world. Bravo new world. Gliff has two pages of meanings, but you'll get to that. Horses are important too (and have 'feathers'!). Identity, gender, dystopia. More linear and 'accessible' than some of her other works in that she plays games but always lets us know the rules. I'm floating around 3 or 4 stars. Not that it really matters.

Rumour has it, after being shortlisted four times but not winning, Ali Smith has asked her publisher now not to submit Gliff for the 2025 Booker. I'm not sure if this is true. A shame if it is, it feels bitter and out of character. Or she's tired and wants to turn her back on big prizes, which is understandable. Oh, and thanks to Penguin for the advance copy.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Ali Smith is at the wheel, a reader knows to strap in for a wild ride. This dystopian excursion into the dangers of a world increasingly being taken over by the proliferation of screens. This is not necessarily the effect of AI, which we are constantly being warned against. But the alienation thanks to the current trend of the lure of a handheld device and its hold over the user. The threat of lithium and its ability to disfigure as its natural supply depletes causing a rise in the harvesting by slaves from outmoded items. The takeover by a regime that in another time would be called fascistic. The abandonment of family. This is a disquieting novel that holds too many truths to be considered totally fictitious.

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in near future Great Britain, this story feels dystopian but is based on current issues taking place in the world, where various governments are seeking out “unverifiables.” In this case, they are asking a series of personal questions to determine if they need to be “re-educated.” It starts with siblings Bri and Rose, who are left to fend for themselves for reasons that are not apparent at first but are eventually revealed. A horse plays a key role. I do not want to say too much about the storyline, since it is best discovered without knowing too much ahead of time.

Smith is obviously concerned about trends in society, where privacy is diminishing, damage to the environment is being ignored, and technology has become addictive and detrimental to connecting with the natural world. It is written in Ali Smith’s distinctive and linguistically playful manner. I understand that this is the first book in a duology so I will be looking forward to the second book, as I hope it will fill in some lingering questions. Smith is paying homage to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which I feel I should re-read to more fully appreciate this duology.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in the quiet early morning each day before the rest of the family got up, as it required my full attention and I could only absorb a bit at a time. It is my 250th book of 2024 and means that I met my goal for the year on the final day of the year with just hours to spare!

This is a truly fascinating book to unpack! It is essentially a dystopian future that could become our present. There are some things that stood out to me. The first is on the topic of education, after all, our youth are our future, we will be passing the baton on to them.

Child: "You are denying us the education that most kids our age are getting from their devices."

Response from their mother: "I'm asking you to source your education more widely and more dimensionally."

The second was the resourcefulness of their mother who could make delicious food from simple ingredients, which was a reminder that we need to pass on our skills to our children and provide them with a knowledge and love of the natural world:

"We can't solve it. But we can still salve it."

Thirdly, I enjoyed all the parts that included horses. My favorite quote is, "A horse is half a ton of panic on a rope." The response, "So don't put a horse on a rope."

Fourthly, I loved the beauty of "Rose of Allendale," and the description of a daisy, "It's called a daisy because it means the day's eye and it's called that because daisies open when it's light and close when it's dark [...] And the petals are like eyelashes."

Finally, the importance of family and maintaining relationships, reaching out in empathy and working collaboratively together, remaining soft.

My sister: "Here she is, back then, next to me now. Her mouth is a firm closed line as clammed as a mystery. Her eyes are open, lit, black and imperturbable. They look like home."

I could read this book all over again and I know I would gain some new knowledge or thought.

[Baz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smith does it again. The cute precocious rebel-heart child and adolescent characters with their cute sweet parents and carers, thinking and talking about language, art and justice.

I needed this. I needed something bright and playful and tricksy. Ali Smith is one of my favourite and most read writers, and I’m so glad, once again, that she’s here. Her stylish fictions have a sentimentality that’s beautiful and infectious. This probably sounds tacky to say but I mean it sincerely: she’s a bit of a guiding spirit. Her work, her voice through her work, is consoling. Gliff, similar to previous novels, inhabits a world in crisis, and entangles in its web lightness, hope, darkness and grimness. It challenges a world obsessed with fear and fear-mongering, and calls for resistance.

All while being as sparkly and dazzling and entertaining in fast-flowing addictive prose as ever. This is one of the highlights of my year. Truly radiant.

[Stephen the Bookworm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ali Smith is the consummate contemporary writer of literature that although appearing minimalist in content has the power to seep deep into you.

After her seasonal quartet, focus in now upon a dystopian future where two young people- Bri and Rose - are placed in hiding by their older brother. With a roof over their head, cans a of food and some money they begin to navigate a new world where buildings, objects and even people are encircled with red paint to identify their removal .

Many years ago I remember saying to a friend that current “civilisation “ will be defined as BSM and SSM - Before the Smart Phone and Since the Smart Phone ..the utter control of technological systems to actually be seen to exist .

This is a world of control - systems that identify individuals through their fingerprints and retinas - else they don’t exist. A world without free thinking ; a world without libraries and books ; a world with theatres ….just screens

This is a story of survival, love and trust in a disturbing landscape . The two youngsters carefully befriend others - who can you trust ? - and find themselves saving a horse which they name Gliff …a polysemous word ..”What is it I’ve done? she said frowning and looking at the unfolded page. You’ve named him a word that doesn’t just mean so many things, it can also mean all of them and none of them at once.”

This is a story that makes you deeply reflect where we are in our current world..Ali Smith hits the nail firmly on the head with many of the thoughts of the characters mirroring much of what a sector of society is thinking.

The reference to the tamagotchi and the idea of keeping an electronic device alive and juxtaposing this with the obsession with mobiles is a perfect analogy towards the obsessive within the smart phone generation.

The tale is left ready for a sequel to determine what happens further to the siblings and can they escape this brutal , brainwashing and controlling system.

Quotes;

If only people paid more attention, she said, to what history tells us rather than all this endless congratulating ourselves for finding a new way to read it.

With reference to the tamagotchi phenomenon of the early 1990s-And that’s what people, somewhere in their unconscious, think about their smartphones, she said, that if they don’t keep attending to them and pressing their buttons, always making them light up and answering every little baby chicken automated cheep they make, then there’s sure to be a death, but this time it’ll be you, the owner of the phone, that’ll be a new kind of dead.

I was sitting on the front wall watching the people who walked up and down the street go past looking at their phones. They all did. Much as I envied every person who had one and who could call their own mother on it, or anyone else, and look up anything at all any time they liked, our mother was right. They did nothing but look at their phones. It made them stumble about. I decided not to envy them.

Yeah but a passport doesn’t prove we’re us, she said. We prove a passport’s it. We just are us. We’re us right now and we don’t have any passports to prove we’re us. Not having a passport doesn’t mean we, what, disappear.

[Hayden Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

a new duology, two books with the same name — Gliff and Glyph.

bless you, Ali Smith.

[ritareadthat · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars

Hmmm. A bit of a dystopian world with some kids surviving on their own, and a horse.

There were some good things the author was trying to do in this book, and then some things that maybe could have just been...more. Firstly, this book is not very plot driven, and world-building is very minimal. We know that the story takes place in a futuristic European country, and from the sounds of it, technology has taken over. (Hello, aren't we there already?) But it's also not very character driven. Other than the main character Bri/Briar, there is extremely minimal details about, and growth of, the other characters, other than perhaps his younger sister, Rose.

So what is this book about then you say? Well to me it was very idea/concept driven. There were various specific passages that did speak to me personally (I'll quote a few below) - mostly about challenging societal norms, finding your own path, and the pros/cons of technology. It's a book that makes you think, and that's what I did enjoy about it. The plot was a bit messy, and a bit nonlinear at times; the story itself was pretty simplified. It was the life lessons hidden within that propelled the book forward in my eyes.

Additionally, it really went over my head whatever the author was trying to do with the play on Brave New World as the headings (missing letters) of some of the "chapters" towards the end. Maybe I need to re-read Brave New World again and I would understand more thoroughly. It has been a bit since I read that and it is one of my favorite classic dystopian books.

Overall, I think this is a good read for anyone enjoys dystopians that make you think.


Favorite Quotes:

"when you went to a new place it was like things were new to the eye and when you got back home your eyes stayed new for a while but not for long enough, they soon got old again."

"It takes a lifetime, sometimes, to work out what anything you're doing's got to do with the real realities of living. Rather than what turns out to be the fake realities."

"They hate to think something outside them can see them and maybe judge them. It's not just men or boys, a lot of people are threatened by knowing that people who they think aren't anything like them exist."

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ik wil minstens elk jaar één Ali Smith lezen. Dat lukte de voorbije jaren prima, nadat ik haar Seasonal Quartet was gaan volgen. Companion Piece vond ik iets minder, maar vorig jaar las ik het uiterst originele Artful.

Met 'Gliff' voegt Ali Smith alweer een nieuw, bescheiden geniaal bedacht pareltje toe aan haar productieve oeuvre. De verbeelding primeert en ze daagt ook graag die van de lezer uit. In deze roman doet ze dat vanuit het standpunt van kinderen die tegelijk iets hoogbegaafd en iets kinderlijk naïef uitstralen dat zich vooral in talige vorm uit.

Het hele boek door voel je een spontaan anarchisme smeulen, van woorden naar daden evoluerend. En vooral die woorden worden door Ali Smith op ondeugend-slimme wijze ingezet als kleine precisiewapens met een filosofisch en maatschappelijk engagerend doel. Het is daarom zo'n boek dat ik mijn Freinet-leerlingen meteen zou willen aanraden. Behalve een vlot lezend Engelstalig boek, worden ze immers aangezet tot taalbeschouwing, zélf denken en een gezond activistische levenshouding. En dan heb ik het nog niet gehad over de verbeelding die ze inzet, o.a. met Gliff het paard, de ingebedde verhalen over een wonderkind met een paardenhoofd of een getergde tiran en de rode verf van de 'super bounder' ...

De spontaan-kritische wijze waarop de twee kinderen, broer Briar en zus Rose, twee doornige namen, de stilzwijgende vanzelfsprekendheden in vraag stellen waarmee een groot deel van onze samenleving zich tegenwoordig in slaapwandelmodus houdt (bv. smartphonegebruik, camera-controles, ID's, pesticiden, slachthuizen, behandeling van illegalen, kinderarbeid achter batterijen, het verdwijnen van biodiversiteit, bibliotheken en leesvaardigheid ...) leest als vintage Ali Smith: geëngageerd ondeugend met inzet van uitdagende taalregisters. Wat ze in haar Seasonal Quartet al aan maatschappijkritiek integreerde, graaft ze hier dieper uit. Heerlijk ...

... zeker omdat het niet bij 'Gliff' blijft, maar volgend jaar een vervolg krijgt met Glyph! Daarmee is het voornemen uit mijn openingszin al gewaarborgd voor 2026.

[Ruben · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first Ali Smith, what a joy to read! I feared it might be too inaccessible for me, but it was rather straightforward and at the same time very well written.

I appreciated how she managed to create a strange, big new world while keeping the story very small. No need to revert to sweeping descriptions of global disaster leading to authoritarianism - the story of two abandoned siblings and their discovery of a horse tells it all.

Below the surface lie what I suspect Smith is worried about: concern about the direction our modern world is taking, environmental destruction, the impact of smartphones on creativity and the lack of independent thinking.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smart, original, funny, and political. Ali Smith is a wonderful wordsmith and I loved every word in this brilliant novel!
Thank you very much Penguin Random House UK for the ARC.

[Trudie · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5
Did Ali Smith write a novel based on a single word? She did, and I loved it.

Gliff - ... a short moment. A slight attack or touch of illness. A whiff. A puff. A nonsense word. A misspelling for glyph. A substitute word for any word. A synonym for spliff. A post-ejaculatory sex act. A mood someone’s partner gets in when they miss their partner too much and get upset about it. To glimmer like sudden unanticipated light. To dispel snow....

Gliff (the novel) is a bit of a horsey dystopia, featuring horses both real and painted; the intense horse and lion paintings by George Stubbs sit alongside horse hair wigs and Pegasus spyware. But at its heart is the story of displaced siblings, Briar and Rose and a lot of painted red lines.
This novel is everything I come to expect from Ali Smith: a perplexing, jigsaw that merges art and literature with a jester-like mischievousness with words and a questioning eye to current events.

I have not always entirely enjoyed Smith's work, although I admire the dazzling cleverness. With Gliff, I have finally broken through some invisible wall of understanding. I finished the novel with questions and the desire to read more; luckily, Glyph (published later this year) will provide. 

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ali Smith does child narrators so well. Gliff is Smith does dystopia- light on specific world building in such a way that makes it deeply unsettling, like the action is all taking place just in the periphery and you can quite penetrate what exactly is going on. At its heart it’s a classic kind of story of insiders and outsiders in a world not dissimilar to our own. It didn’t soar to Smith’s greatest heights for me but I always love to be submerged in her unique voice, and here her love of language shone not just as a narrative voice but as a warning to us all about the power of language to shape our perceptions of the world. I’m very interested to see where the companion novel, Glyph, takes this world.

[Tilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

2025 Booker prize winner or else I’m going to start a riot

[Els Book Hunters]

Entrar a l'univers d'Ali Smith no és tasca fàcil. I això és paradoxal, perquè l'autora no fa altra cosa que posar-nos un mirall a davant o, si voleu, una pantalla, on ens mostra el nostre món tal i com és. Això sí, per explicar-nos el que hi veiem tria maneres diverses i canviants, experimenta amb l'imaginari i el llenguatge. I a Gliff, fins i tot, s'atreveix a donar-li forma de distopia.

Dic forma, perquè ni així s'allunya gaire de la realitat. Desnonaments, repressió policial, control social per videovigilància, intel·ligència artificial, llibertat d'expressió, masculinitats fràgils i, per sobre de tot, hipercapitalisme. De veritat us sembla que Smith s'ha empescat una novel·la futurista?

Això sí, l'estètica opressiva i el dibuix d'aquesta societat sí que es permet certes llicències literàries. La distinció entre verificables i no-verificables, la línia de pintura vermella que marca la legalitat, i altres detalls que s'uneixen a la resta de simbolisme més subtil per construir un nou artefacte que disfressa, una mica més que habitualment, la crònica que l'autora gaudeix plasmant. I no oblida temes tan seus com la identitat ambigua, la llengua, l'art o la defensa aferrissada de les biblioteques.

Tot, com sempre, fent servir els seus personatges mínims. En aquest cas dues germanes (les anomenarem així), menors d'edat, abandonades, que han d'aprendre a sobreviure en un món que les ha abocat a la marginalitat. Pràcticament només disposen dels seus records.

Smith experimenta, juga, sempre tinc la impressió que l'avorreix l'escriptura convencional. Però jo he acabat comprant la seva fórmula. La trobo una creadora excel·lent. Tan bona, que de vegades em passa per sobre. Però li he de continuar reconeixent el mèrit. I Gliff m'ha semblat dels millors llibres que li he llegit, per ara.

(SERGI)

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[Ksen Tsuk · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love Ali Smith, but this reads like a stereotypical old grandma complaining about technologies. Maybe she asked chat GPT to write this book in her style to prove her point (I would be less upset if she did).