Two-thirds of the way through Ali Smith’s new novel Gliff there is a list of definitions for the titular word, a very Smithian list that shows the author’s trademark curiosity in the breadth of language. The meanings range from a wink of sleep, a touch of illness, a nonsense word, a synonym for spliff, a postejaculatory sex act, an organisation in Vienna working to prevent drug abuse, among others. Quite an impressive feat for one little word, and yet of all of the given meanings, the one that sticks in the mind after finishing the novel is “a sudden or chance view”.
Part allegory, part dystopian fiction and an altogether thrilling read, Gliff offers a scarily prescient look at a near-future where the next generation is tasked at solving, and surviving, the sins of now. A call to arms that, crucially, doesn’t read like one. There is nothing didactic about Smith’s style of storytelling, just a window into another world where greed, exploitation and intolerance have continued to grow, leading to inevitable chaos and decline.
Smith’s genius is to show us this world – our sudden, chance view – and at the same time ask us to consider how such horrors might be prevented. Her story has features of a classic quest narrative, beginning with two young siblings, Bri and Rose, who are forced out of their home when a red line, “supera boundering,” is painted around the property, essentially designating them pariahs. With their mother working at an “art hotel” in an unreachable, faraway town and their guardian, her boyfriend Leif, apparently gone to find her, the children set off on foot to find food and shelter.
The siblings are wonderfully drawn, a bright, intelligent pair whose mother kept them off the internet and instilled in them a love of language and nature. Narrator Bri, the elder sibling, instantly endears themself to the reader as they try to navigate the dangerous adult world to protect their sister. Rose, meanwhile, isn’t interested in protection. After finding a field of horses, she befriends the owner’s son and convinces him to let her buy her favourite, a silver horse that she names Gliff.
Over the course of the short, present day narrative the siblings and Gliff encounter various friends and mentors – an art historian who explains the concept of the sublime, a station master willing to help with the horse, an elderly lady “in a long black coat shouting, You can’t bulldoze history.” Along with these mentor figures, there are menaces with alarming real world overtones, not least in the form of Posho, a violent young misogynist whose threats against womankind seem to him just a casual form of conversation.
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Smith’s command over the story, her ease with the dystopian genre, allows her to play with form throughout the book, with word games that elucidate her themes, even the occasional pun in Latin, which is hard to imagine other authors getting away with so successfully. This same facility sees her shift easily into the future where the dystopia is more extreme, the siblings separated, Bri so utterly broken that they have become part of the machine. Though Smith resists giving details of the abuse – “one line about it is more than enough” – the reader can sadly fill in the gaps themselves: “Are you a boy or a girl? Yes I am, I said ... They told me what they’d decided I was.”
Acclaimed in recent years for her Seasonal Quarter, Smith’s back catalogue includes The Accidental, Hotel World and How to Be Both. Shortlisted four times for the Booker Prize, she has won the Goldsmiths Prize, Orwell Prize, Costa Best Novel Award and the Women’s Prize. With Gliff she delivers a moving, insightful treatise on the overlapping crises affecting the world today – political, social, economic and environmental – and how little it might take for things to get so much worse.
Throughout, the depressing subject matter is lightened by Smith’s humour and whimsy, her ingenuity on the page. The wry, inquiring voice of Rose brings relief in even the darkest of moments. Her character gets all the best lines, from witty rebuttals and jokes to malapropisms that make a strange kind of sense in the awful new world order.
Smith’s dystopia, with its mix of light and shade, is reminiscent of the sci-fi writing of George Saunders. His story Love Letter, from the collection Liberation Day, also inhabits a terrible near-future with the aim of interrogating the issue of personal responsibility in the present. When and how should we take up arms? These are stories that explore the breaking point, the point of no return. Or as Smith puts it in Gliff, “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?”
Sarah Gilmartin’s latest novel is Service
