Gliff (2024)
Why this one?
After a bit of a false start (ages ago now) not getting on with Autumn, I read How to be both as part of my Women’s Prize winners project and then jumped back to The Accidental, and loved them both. So now I’m fully on board, I wanted to check out a more recent release.
Ali Smith (1962- ; active 1986- ), was born in Inverness, Scotland to working-class parents. She studied English Language & Literature at the University of Aberdeen and then began a PhD in American and Irish modernism at Cambridge. During this time she began writing plays and so did not complete her doctorate. In the late eighties she regularly had plays performed at the Edinburgh Fringe, before focusing more attention on prose, with her first book of shorts, Free Love and Other Stories, published in 1995.
Her first novel was 1997's Like, which she followed with Hotel World in 2001. The latter was shortlisted for both the 2001 Booker (losing out to Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang) and the same year's Women's Prize (won by the rather lovely The Idea of Perfection.) She repeated the same feat with 2005's The Accidental (this time pipped by John Banville’s surprise winner The Sea and Zadie Smith's On Beauty respectively.) How to Be Both won the Goldsmiths Prize and Costa novel prize in 2014 before finally giving her the Women's Prize in 2015. She has since written four seasonal 'state of the nation' works beginning with 2016's Autumn (also Booker shortlisted) which was written in the immediate aftermath of the UK's 2016 Brexit referendum, plus a fifth in the series, Companion Piece.
(Incidentally, of relevance to this blog in particular, S
Thoughts, etc.
Gliff is set in a near-future dystopian version of what seems to be somewhere in England. In it we meet two children, the slightly older Briar/Brice/Bri and their younger sister Rose. Their mother has been taken away for dissent and we initially find them in the care of her boyfriend Leif. They come home to find their house with a red line painted around it, which they take as a cue to flee. When the same happens to their camper van, Leif takes the children to a 'safe house' and sets off alone to look for their mother. From there on in, Bri and Rose are left to fend for themselves.
Their world is largely recognisable, with even its most troubling shifts all plausible in our ever-darkening present day world. The red lines recur throughout the book: everything marked with them is marked as tainted, fit for destruction or removal. There's little distinction between property to be destroyed and people that get in the way of the line painters - their fate is bound up with that of their property. The people marked out are 'unverifiables' - those who have typically been marked out as beyond the pale. They are sent to 'reeducation centres' ('arks'), which we find later in the novel are predictably grim places to end up. They are typically sent to these places 'because of words' - with Smith specifically listing such crimes in ways that are depressingly familiar to a reader in 2024/25 - denial that a genocide is a genocide, pointing out that oil companies have caused the climate crisis, the Orwellian crime of saying a war is a war. There are hints that while these crimes predominate, they can also be used as pretexts for getting rid of other undesirables.
The book’s blurb concludes by asking ‘what does a horse have to do with all of this?’, which is a very fair question, even having read the thing. At some point Bri and Rose find a horse, who they somehow part-purchase from a farmer’s son called Colon (they check, it’s definitely not Colin). Rose gives the horse the name Gliff, hence the title, though we learn over the course of several pages that the word ‘gliff’ has many and varied meanings. Gliff subsequently tags along with the siblings as they take refuge in an abandoned school with a ragtag bunch of dissenting rebels who have somehow evaded capture. I think broadly the horse is brought into the picture as something of a symbol of hope against some of the forces which dominate in the neo-fascist society. That her former keeper Colon and his thuggish brother are symbols of the techno-enslaved dystopian orthodoxy is likely important; as is the fact that the siblings’ purchase of the horse is never completed. Ultimately, though, these vague musings are somewhat futile. Gliff, like the word used to name her, is elusive, symbolic of maybe something, maybe nothing. Throughout the book words are provisional, temporary things. Sometimes dangerous, sometimes useful, sometimes meaningless. The later chapters each begin with a fractured/modified version of the phrase ‘Brave New World’, which warps (by the removal or addition of letters) that familiar emblem of dystopia into phrases that are sometimes ominous, sometimes hopeful, again sometimes meaningless.
While the ending of the book offers further sparks of hope, some also involving horses, that’s not before it takes us further into the future, in which we see the rewards and pitfalls of co-option into the orthodoxy of such a regime. We also get illustrations of the conditions within the ‘arks’ in which unverifiables are enslaved - which are relatively unsurprising in the context of the totalitarian dystopia we find ourselves in (heavy surveillance, physical abuse, aspects too grim to be named). I guess the predictability is again somewhat part of the point - while the conditions described are to some degree extremes of everything in one place, there’s nothing specific mentioned that isn’t already happening in low-waged employment spaces somewhere in the modern world.
Ultimately, that’s both what makes Gliff at once a tremendously powerful and an at times painful read. It follows Smith’s quartet (/quintet) of contemporaneous commentary with something ostensibly weirder, riddled with dystopian tropes and wordplay that sends our senses off balance, purporting to be a glimpse at the near future. Really, though, much of the dark future envisaged in this book is already here with us. Maybe not always all of it all at once, and maybe it requires the nudge of a metaphor or a few letters shifting in the language to reveal its true meaning, but on such subtleties does our future seemingly hinge.
Score
9.5
I can’t pretend to have entirely ‘enjoyed’ this book (though that’s not to say it doesn’t have its moments of fun, often wordplay-related), nor to have fully understood everything about it. (It’s due to be followed later this year by an accompanying volume titled Glyph, which may or may not answer some of the outstanding questions it poses). Regardless, its vibe has hung over me constantly since I’ve read it. Like much of what Smith seems to be trying to do these days, it’s a book that directly interacts with and informs the readers’ experience of the increasingly troubling times we inhabit. It’s powerful, but deeply unsettling stuff.
Next up
More Netgalley books, I think.
