#gliff

Gliff by Ali Smith

Two children decode a dystopia, in a chilling and wistful novel that speaks to our times

Ali Smith has never been afraid to take cleverness seriously. It is a distinctly European sensibility, yet its fullest vindication came amid the xenophobic pageantry of Brexit. The Seasonal Quartet was the work of an intellectual first responder, urgently cataloguing the treasures of pluralism as the body politic celebrated its sweaty fiesta of insularity. Not many novelists could have pulled that off.

It’s not as if that crisis has passed; it’s just been subsumed by bigger ones, and Smith hasn’t been standing idly by. Gliff is to be followed in 2025 by Glyph, a sister novel that will further explore “how we make meanings and … are made meaningless”. As ever, Smith delights in sportive wordplay, but those obliquely iterating titles belie a frank clarity of purpose. The world is on fire, Ali Smith is here to tell us, and this emergency calls for some urgent semiotics.

It’s no accident that the proposition sounds facetious. Semiotics, the study of signs and their meanings, is exactly the sort of zero-stakes, language-adjacent discipline that writers, by convention, are allowed to be clever about. The Name of the Rose, by trained semiotician Umberto Eco, may have been formidably erudite, but it was also titanically inconsequential. Smith doesn’t have time for any of that. She has a crisis on her hands.

In the Brexit novels, that crisis was necessarily specific, requiring a substrate of contemporary realism. This time, though, Smith grants herself more speculative licence, presenting us with a grim extrapolation of our current trajectory. As Gliff opens, two children huddle before a loading dock at the hotel where their mother works. With them is a man called Leif, who confers with the woman in terse snatches before leading the children away. There are microphones and cameras. It isn’t safe to talk. For now, beyond the sparely dystopian vibes, this is all the exposition we get.

It’s all the children get, too. But like displaced children everywhere, Briar and Rose – see what she did there? – are possessed of a fanatical alertness. Leaving the hotel, they find their bearings using Google Maps, where salience is glowingly monetised and the only landmarks are luxury brands: “Now Gucci. Now Nike.” The very surfaces and textures of this world are encrypted, encoded with the brutish ciphers of money and power. But the signs, if you know how to read them, are everywhere.

Returning home, they find that a bright red line has been painted around their house, demarcating it from its neighbours. For Leif, the meaning of this is immediate and indelible: time to go. But negotiating with rule systems is what children do. Finding a gap in the line, they simply squeeze through.

It is a skill they will come to depend on. Separated from Leif, they find a house to squat in. Rose, the younger of the two, turns inwards, becoming besotted with the horses that graze in a nearby field. She names her favourite Gliff, a Scottish word whose many meanings – among them glance, trace and inkling – take a page and a half to enumerate. Here they do duty as both in-joke (polysemy is a big deal in semiotics) and incantation, as one lost child reconstructs her own oral tradition. When Briar tells her they are abattoir horses, she has no use for the designation. “You are bullying me,” she responds, “with words longer than my life.”

It’s a typically Smithian flourish, half wistful and half chilling, and in that it foreshadows a great deal. Growing anxious, Briar conducts reconnaissance missions, venturing to the corner shop and the train station, thinking to retrace their route. But the ticket machines are for people whose devices let them pass. In Smith’s refinement of the Orwellian vision, no boots are required. There’s just the computer saying “no”, for ever.

A workman with a line-painting machine is accosted by an elderly activist. Briar takes note of the model name, and as the scene unfolds toys with its components, its volatile freight of meanings. Again, that name – the “Supera Bounder” – is a typically Smithian gem, a little prism whose prettily refracted colours belie a totalitarian purity of purpose.

Befriended by Oona, the elderly activist, Briar acquires a kindly instructor in revolutionary praxis. Drawing on Oona’s store of memories, they begin sifting the cultural wreckage and decoding their own past. For the children’s mother, we learn, tried to play both sides, a corporate shill turned whistle-blower. Picking apart the antique metaphor, Briar grasps what their mother didn’t: that the gesture was empty not because it made no difference but because truth-telling itself is now obsolete.

Her choice left the children among the “unverified”, without status in the all-pervasive “system”, but what other choices are there? What modes of resistance are available, when a corporatized state controls the very currency of meaning? When the children are separated, Smith shows us one possibility and summons the ghost of another. Like Smith herself, children are born subversives, possessed of a radical plasticity. If they cannot save the world, they will “solve it by salving it”.

It helps in all of this that Smith’s natural mode of discourse, in the best way, resembles the questing and venturesome learning strategies of children. In semiotics, a sign is said to be overdetermined when it must accommodate many meanings. Smith is alert to such abstruse points, as when Rose objects to the idea that a passport proves she’s her: “We prove a passport’s it.” But the cleverness she celebrates is innate and ordinary. It is human, in other words, and Gliff is the mark of just such a native genius.

Gliff by Ali Smith

this book really fits the mood of my 2025 so far: creepingly dystopian, but maintaining some hope, some avenues of joy and resistance. also, there's a horse, and i was once a Horse Girl, so that had deep appeal.

i loved Gliff top to bottom, but i want to call out the pacing first of all because it worked especially well for me. the way the story and the world unfolds, through the perception of a sheltered kid—and periodically, their future self—really captured the sensation i have right now, of continually learning new and increasingly worse information about how my country and others are actually being run, and where they're going. the innocence of Bri and their sister Rose, and how untouched they are by the literal and figurative brainwashing of technology, creates an opportunity to slowly explore more and more dystopian ideas and experiences that are already happening to other people around them. it's like watching a mystery unfold, and then getting smacked by understanding when Bri's future self interjects; i went on a roller coaster of fear for Bri and Rose, delight at their small and spirited acts of defiance, and the dread/hope mix that comes from knowing where a character ends up.

all of the side characters are exciting as well, real and specific in their personhoods, including the titular horse Gliff. that realism, all the weird idiosyncrasies of actual people, contrasts so effectively with the mundane horror of the world around them and with the very large messages the story is engaging with about knowledge, and community, and liberation, and kindness. about how easy it is to become a part of a terrible machine, and also that there's still hope to break out of it and create disruption on your way. that last part is a hard concept sometimes—that even a person who has been molded to do awful things, for whom cruelty has become normal, can reach a tipping point or find a way out, and what they do next is as important to consider as what they did before. it's a theme that's coming up for me across my media consumption, and it's one i am really trying to integrate into my thinking about the real world.

that was a little bit of a ramble, but this book has me thinking big thoughts! overall i really, really enjoyed it, and i'll be thinking about it for a long time.

the deets

how i read it: an egalley from NetGalley, unsurprisingly!

try this if you: love a horse as a metaphor, still have the stomach to read great dystopian fiction even though we're living in one, or if you watched Tomes & Talismans during library class in school and are still haunted by it

some lines i really liked:

She always missed out the g in conglomerate. I said she did this because she didn't know how to say it, she said it was because she was taking some of a conlomerate's power away from it by mis-saying it.

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How do you get your education then? he said. We choose to be educated by things bigger than something so small it can be worn on a human wrist, I said. What other way is there? he said. I gestured with both my arms to everything around us. I don't get it, he said. You know, I said. Being here. In person. He looked thoughtful, then superior. I suppose it's not everybody that can afford an educator, he said. Then he told us some of the things his educator could do other than just educate. 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.

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What do we need passports for? she said. So we can travel to other countries and prove we're us, I said. 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.

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A tyrant runs a country. He does this via a lot of other people doing this tyrant's work for him. They do it partly because they think he'll kill them or their families of they don't, and partly because it makes them feel powerful too. One of the things you're not allowed to say in this country is that the tyrant is a tyrant. Anyway the tyrant wakes up one morning to find there's this person out there who is going round telling the populace the tyrant's a tyrant and encouraging them to say so out loud to each other. So the tyrant has the person followed, then attacked, then beaten up and stripped of all their money. Then he has the person arrested, put in prison and occasionally tortured, and starved, and kept alone in the cold. But the person doesn't seem broken by any of it.

Briar (traditionally feminine name) later introduces themself as Brice (traditionally masculine name) or as both names to several people.

When asked by one of said several people, they pretty much hit the "my pronouns are none of you business shitlord" and say it doesn't matter.

Bri, the main character, tells the story in first person. We never get their pronouns.

Which is mostly true. The people who process unverifiables (I'll get to that later) stripped them naked and looked at their genitals and assigned them a gender. The processors were, indeed, shitbags.

Being "unverifiable" means, in this context, you aren't or can't be processed in the system. Maybe you don't use digital devices which can track you, maybe you're homeless, maybe you ran away because surveillance society is ass, maybe you're nonbinary in a binary society. See also: Bri, who is all 4.

The masc name that Bri is processed into the system with is made up. The only people to call them "Mister" and "Allendale" and "Sir" and the like are those who represent or are a part of this oppressive surveillance society.