“See what a simple line, a visible mark of the utmost simplicity and cheapness, can do to a populace?” In Ali Smith’s new novel, Gliff, that line is painted in crude bright red around the houses of those the state has deemed “unverified”. It means ostracisation, re-education and worse. It is where the social media verification tick meets the red cross daubed on the door of plague victims in the 14th century: one of many dark and clever jokes in this dystopian puzzlebox of a story.
Smith’s 13th novel (past hits include her award-winning How to be Both and her state-of-the-nation, post-Brexit Seasonal Quartet) is about two siblings who find themselves on the wrong side of that red line. It’s set in a near-future Britain with enough of now in it to make it both frightening and funny. People do “nothing but look at their phones. It made them stumble about”; Shake It Off is an “old song”. Tesco, Gucci and Chanel still exist, libraries do not, and children wear “educators” — smartwatches — making classrooms and teachers obsolete, too. Pollution and climate change have ravaged the landscape. The rich are “smoothed as if airbrushed, as if you really could digitally alter real people”; the poor have forgotten what real food tastes like.
The siblings are Bri and Rose, barely in their teens. We meet them visiting their mother, who is covering her ill sister’s shifts at a hotel. We are not given the impression that she can leave. They go home, with their stepfather Leif, and find their house has been encircled by red paint, a mystery to the children but not to him: he bundles them into their camper van and they flee to a strange town where he leaves them in an empty house to fend for themselves while he goes to find their mother.
Their story has the quality of a children’s fable — Rose rescues a horse destined for the abattoir and, surreally, it ends up living downstairs — spliced with moments of darkness: a teenage incel tells Rose in violent detail about the day “she’d be taught what she’d deserved”. That shadow grows darker as it emerges this story is narrated five years in the future by Bri, now working at a factory staffed by the unverified.
You can be unverified for not having the correct documentation; you can be unverified for saying the wrong thing. In this society, cancelling is taken to its most bleak and extreme conclusion.
This is a book huge in scope, its frame of reference enormous
Fans of Smith’s novels will find Bri a familiar figure: preternaturally clever and in love with the possibilities of language. “It was always exciting to me the number of things a single word could mean,” Bri says early on. There is a whole chapter on the definitions of Gliff, the title of the book and the name Rose gives the horse: “To glint. To gleam. To glare. To flare.”
There are countless riffs on alternate meanings of words that read like clever doodles scribbled in the margins and will either delight you or drive you half-mad. One chapter follows Bri unpicking the meaning of a Latin inscription: “It was thrilling to me to sit and try to piece it together, even if I was wrong… Thrilling to me, the variety. Thrilling both to know and to not know, to be gifted possibilities”.
We come to realise only gradually that Bri is non-binary; clarified simply in an offhand question — “Are you a boy or a girl? Yes I am, I said” — and then brutally in a chilling scene in which detention officers “told me what they’d decided I was”. Ambiguous identities are at the heart of Smith’s writing and are here set in opposition to this controlling dystopian world.
This is a book huge in scope, its frame of reference enormous: art (there is a whole chapter analysing a George Stubbs painting), fairy tales (Briar Rose, the name shared by the siblings, is another term for Sleeping Beauty), Shakespeare (Smith has fun with the phrase “brave new world”) — it will leave you breathless, and reaching for a dictionary. Occasionally it feels too contemporary; the cultural references can be clunky and the politics unsubtle. Both Bri and Rose are almost absurdly clever and self-aware for their age.
But it is also a story about two children who have lost their mother, with moments that are spare and full of powerful feeling.
Gliff is above all a book that forces you to be comfortable with ambiguity. It will be partnered next year by Glyph, a companion novel which promises to reveal a story hidden in this one. It will be a joy to puzzle it out.
Fiona Roberts-Moore is Head of Production at the London Standard
