A few notes on the Gliff series.
Ali Smith is a wonder. The Scottish writer (currently based in Cambridge, England) is one of the most prolific novelists working today, and she is almost certainly the most timely in terms of her political depictions. Her recent Seasonal Quartet of novels addressed the world’s growing political dysfunction in near real time. Now she’s given us the two-volume Gliff series (Gliff last year and, on May 19 in the U.S., its follow-up, Glyph). Since the novels are thematically related we’ll address them both in this review.
Let’s begin with the word “Gliff” itself—of Scottish origin, and most commonly defined as meaning a transient glance, especially of something that startles or frightens. The word is thematically apt, and it also fits with Smith’s playfulness as a writer: a mere glimpse of something fraught, followed by something more concrete with “Glyph,” a hieroglyphic character or symbol or a pictograph. The second word is the more concrete of the two, referencing something specific. Likewise with the two novels: Gliff describes a vague, near-term dystopia but Glyph references the ongoing, catastrophic genocide in Gaza.
Both books employ two children as protagonists, along with an important horse (hence the paired book jackets). The horse (named Gliff in the eponymous first novel) is used as a symbol of freedom and hope.
Briar (gender unspecified in the beginning of the novel but usually addressed as “Bri”) and their younger sister Rose are the children in the first book, which I find the slightly stronger of the two. Bri and Rose are left to fend for themselves in an unspecified location resembling Britain. Their mother is on an errand to help someone else, entrusting their care to her boyfriend Leif. The errand takes longer than expected, and Leif sets out to find their mother, leaving the kids in a friend’s deserted house with some food and money, enough to last until he returns, supposedly.
The kids encounter a horse nearby, who is scheduled to be shipped to an abattoir. Bri teases Rose about not knowing the meaning of “abattoir,” which is typical of the focus on words and their meanings throughout both novels. Rose of course falls in love with the horse, whom she names Gliff. Because this word is obscure, Bri tells their sister it’s a great choice—the name could mean nothing or anything.
When Leif fails to return, the kids take off with Gliff. They encounter of series of dystopian episodes as “UV” (unverified) people, before eventually making their way back to their original home.
But that house is now gone; a kind of AstroTurf, which Gliff attempts to eat, has replaced it. Gliff has earlier described how the kids’ original house was surrounded with a painted red line, which turned out to be a prelude to its destruction. UV people and their homes are not tolerated under the current regime. During their visit, Bri is captured by the authorities while Rose manages to escape.
We then segue to a new time frame, some five years later. Bri has suffered a series of traumas at the hands of their captors, including sexual abuse. Bri is now labeled a “he” and is eventually given a managerial role in a horrendous factory, where UVs are made to undertake ghastly, dangerous, disfiguring work. Rose had managed to escape when Bri was captured and has now disappeared.
Bri has to completely close off their own personality to do the managerial work they were assigned. Eventually they can’t, and they rebel instead. Bri and Rose are not reunited, but it’s implied that Rose is still alive and the novel concludes on a hopeful note.
Glyph (thanks to NetGalley for the advance look) features Petra and her younger sister Patch (Patricia). Here, the girls endure the long illness and then the death of their mother. At their mother’s funeral, the girls are told two war stories by relatives that disturb them for the rest of their lives. The first concerns a man completely flattened by tanks on a roadside in France during wartime. The second is about a soldier who was executed for disobedience because he refused to kill a horse blinded by gas in the war.
As children, the older Petra protects and comforts her younger sister, inventing imaginary conversations with the flattened man and the blind horse to let Patch know everything turned out OK in the end.
The latter half of the book features the sisters as adults, who are estranged for some reason. They are reunited when an imaginary horse shows up and destroys Petra’s bedroom, and Petra reaches out to her sister for help. The reader is now situated in our present.
Billie, Patch’s teenage daughter, is the catalyst for Smith’s take on the atrocities in Gaza. She witnesses a TV video of a horse emerging from under tons of rubble there:
A horse’s head, the bridge of the nose first, pushes through and out of the pile of stuff and thrashes around.
It is a horsehead made of dust.
Dust and rubbly shapes shake loose down from the ears and off the neck. Front legs are suddenly there and scrabbling, and a broad chest appears, back legs appear, kicking and finding their footing, then the whole brickheap rises like it’s getting to its feet itself, as the horse does, as the horse sheds the broken stuff. Then a horse the colour of stonedust and concrete stands in a pile of broken stones and concrete, dust rising off it like smoke. It shakes itself out of there and stumbles over the stones and away.
There is much more from Gaza, most of it much worse. Glyph does not close on a note of optimism, as Gliff did. Instead, the message seems to be that the horrors in the world today have always been there, and always will be, forever and ever.
Whether you enjoy either of these novels will depend on a few things. Do you have strong empathy? Can you accept Smith’s distinctive blend of humor and horror, coupled with spontaneous invention and wordplay? Are you OK with novelists who directly address the growing political dysfunction around the world? I personally check all these boxes, so I highly recommend these novels. No other writer tackles the world’s current drift toward authoritarianism as frequently and effectively as Smith has done.
If any of the questions above resonate with you, and you’re at all curious, then these novels likely won’t disappoint. Smith is a four-time Booker finalist; given her productivity, she is likely to take that prize home eventually.