(4.5) Ali Smith books usually feel utterly necessary, as though their arrival is part of some underground cathartic manifestation of defiance and hope and furious refusal to submit. Gliff is no different. It should -- as should the seasonal quintet -- be part of the national curriculum. It will become, like most of her work, canonical.

Another huge dose of revitalising literary medicine.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for review.

A dystopian novel that is difficult to understand in places. It's about two children who struggle to live outside a system that they don't think they fit into.
Thank you to Net Galley for an advanced copy

Gliff is a very Ali Smith book, and not at all the book that I thought Ali Smith would write. Leaning heavily into Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ (I think… I haven’t read Brave New World, nobody @ me if that’s wrong), Smith presents a near-future surveillance state where people are ‘unverified’ for refusing to comply to the whims of the state.

“Okay. Let me get the form up. Right. Date of birth place of birth ethnicity uh gender we got. Sexuality. Careful what you answer. Religion. Careful what you answer.”

Gliff is the story of two children living off-grid, separated from their guardians and endeavouring to live outside of the system that aims to fit everyone into neat categories. This refusal to comply is embodied by Briar, a gender non-conforming teen who - in true Ali Smith fashion - is fascinated by words and meanings. The reader is thrown in the deep end, with details of the civilisation in which Briar and their sister live slowly unravelled rather than spoon-fed to us. It’s very effective; I was immediately won over by the way Smith establishes the looming presence of the state’s authority, mixed with her trademark wordplay (and, as the cover art would suggest, a fair amount of horse-play). This is, in parts at least, a much darker novel than I was expecting, but also a deeply human story of hope and rebellion.

As part of a larger story, along with her forthcoming ‘Glyph’, this is a novel designed not to explain all of its mysteries, with things only fully revealed upon reading the partner novel. On its own, Gliff is mysterious and complex, and a novel I’ll be keen to revisit. Nobody writes like Ali Smith, and her signature style is very present here in the witty dialogue and clever execution of double meanings. The speculative world-building allows her to explore the dangers of an over-reliance on technology and a society where citizens stop pushing back against injustice. It’s overtly political, and a worthy follow-up to her incredible Seasonal (5-part) Quartet.

While I think it’s too early to call this Smith at her very best before we see what further complexities Glyph adds upon its publication, this is undeniably Smith at very very good.

Ali Smith, one of the UK's greatest novelists, turning her hand to dystopian fiction in her own unique style... count me in!

Following the brilliance of the seasonal quartet and its companion piece was always going to be a tough act, especially if like me you felt there were masterpieces. Gliff, I am happy to report, doesn't disappoint. There are her usual word plays, narrative techniques and style. Though there is a plot, it is not a novel to be read for plot. It is a novel to revel in, to savour and to be thankful that novelists like Smith continue to publish.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

Ali Smith has become I would say something of a literary national treasure with "How To Be Both" and the Seasonal Quartet.

This is her latest novel and has many tropes that will be familiar to those who are like me fans of her writing:

The copious use of wordplay – homonyms, variations on a word, words with multiple meanings (and even here words with letters that start to disappear). Most noticeably and while the book’s blurb tells us correctly that “Gliff” is a “Scottish/northern word for a shock, a fright, a transient moment, a glance or sudden glimpse” – an entire chapter of the book reveals a wide range of alternative meanings with a later chapter then using an Urban Dictionary definition of “a substitute word for any word” (which I think may come from its apparent use in vocabulary aptitude tests in place of “____”)

An innovative publication approach. This time we are told that “Gliff” contains a hidden story which will only emerge in “Glyph”(a signifying mark – as in ‘hieroglyph’) a novel to be published in 2025 – with the two novels said to belong to each other (that idea of what belonging or ownership means being one of the very things this novel explores – in particular in the concept of human/animal relations)

The trademark slightly fey young child – here the narrator Bri(ar)’s younger sister Rose but also Briar themselves.

Literary and artistic references – I have spoken in the past about Smith’s work being something of a literary/art palimpsest (something Smith has included in previous works such as “How to Be Both”). Here literary references include most noticeable Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (although here the text Brave New World is literally erased in the text rather than covered over), Max Frisch’s novella “Man in the Holocene”, the horse (and horse and lion) paintings of the 18th century painter George Stubbs and the fairy tale Briar Rose as well as apparent references to legends of fairies.

Political themes – typically written from a liberal/left wing, green viewpoint. Here Smith rails (perhaps that is an exaggeration given the lightness of her writing) against: smart phones (in what is in many respect a near and sometimes far future dystopian novel - the educators worn by other children seem chillingly little different in function or potential risk and impact from today’s smart watches); exploitative capitalism in both the service industries and in factories; environmental degradation (the most dangerous factories are based around extracting batteries from devices); the vacuum at the heart of rampant and performative consumerism – the real well-off in the society are so inert in their luxury as to be little distinguishable from still-life; industrial-agriculture and much more.

In terms of brief plot the book is set in, as I have said a near-future, country which to me seems a lot like England/Scotland. It opens with Bri (who when asked if they are male or female – and this in a society obsessed with measurement and recording and putting people in boxes, says “yes”) and Rose and their mother’s partner Leif leaving their mother in a luxury hotel where she is surreptitiously covering the work of her ill sister.

But when they return and find their home outlined with red paint (a marking which seems to convey some form of a pariah status of people who are “unverified” Uvs – for either their speaking of taboos or their unwillingness to participate in the digitised surveillance society which Bri’s Mum – a believer in reading and learning – resists) they flee. Shortly after their camper van is also outlined in red and Leif leaves them in a deserted safe house while he attempts to get their mother and avoid being placed in some form of adult retraining centre.

From there they eventually befriend a set of fellow outcasts living in an old school – St Saccobanda’s Sixth Form college (later a passage tells a tale of a horse headed daughter called Saccobanda) but more importantly before that they buy/rescue/steal an abattoir bound horse – a grey gelding (from his size) pony that Rose calls Gliff (although whether you can name a horse is a subject of some discussion - although as an aside the correct answer “Yes, normally a formal registered and informal stable name, but never change the informal name as it is really bad luck” is not given).

The story is effectively told by Bri some years later. Somehow they have gone inside society with an assumed identity and are working as a supervisor in a retraining factory, but an encounter with one of the workers (who claims to have known her sister in an organisation which for me seemed to have a potential link via the Campion flower to Bri’s mother) brings back the past.

Now I have to say that any book with a grey gelding pony and its centre (and its inside cover) is by default worth five stars already but I think the book works for the non-horse lover (although it may be a book which makes you want to shut the book and at least spend some time with a horse, and if so do not resist the temptation) – but so is any book written by Ali Smith.

And this is an intriguing novel if perhaps elusive – there is limited world building and little closure – and I am already looking forward to Glyph to see how much of what is unclear in this novel is revealed.

The things I liked best about Ali Smith's latest novel Gliff was her characteristic wordplay and interest in language and the relationship and interactions between the main character and the younger sister.

Ali Smith is the consummate contemporary writer of literature that although appearing minimalist in content has the power to seep deep into you.

After her seasonal quartet, focus in now upon a dystopian future where two young people- Bri and Rose - are placed in hiding by their older brother. With a roof over their head , cans a of food and some money they begin to navigate a new world where buildings, objects and even people are encircled with red paint to identify their removal .

Many years ago I remember saying to a friend that current “civilisation “ will be defined as BSM and SSM - Before the Smart Phone and Since the Smart Phone ..the utter control of technological systems to actually be seen to exist .

This is a world of control - systems that identify individuals through their fingerprints and retinas - else they don’t exist. A world without free thinking ; a world without libraries and books ; a world with theatres ….just screens

This is a story of survival, love and trust in a disturbing landscape . The two youngsters carefully befriend others - who can you trust ? - and find themselves saving a horse which they name Gliff …a polysemous word ..”What is it I’ve done? she said frowning and looking at the unfolded page. You’ve named him a word that doesn’t just mean so many things, it can also mean all of them and none of them at once.”

This is a story that makes you deeply reflect where we are in our current world..Ali Smith hits the nail firmly on the head with many of the thoughts of the characters mirroring much of what a sector of society is thinking.
The reference to the tamagotchi and the idea of keeping an electronic device alive and juxtaposing this with the obsession with mobiles is a perfect analogy towards the obsessive within the smart phone generation.

The tale is left ready for a sequel to determine what happens further to the siblings and can they escape this brutal , brainwashing and controlling system

Quotes;

If only people paid more attention, she said, to what history tells us rather than all this endless congratulating ourselves for finding a new way to read it.

With reference to the tamagotchi phenomenon of the early 1990s-And that’s what people, somewhere in their unconscious, think about their smartphones, she said, that if they don’t keep attending to them and pressing their buttons, always making them light up and answering every little baby chicken automated cheep they make, then there’s sure to be a death, but this time it’ll be you, the owner of the phone, that’ll be a new kind of dead.

I was sitting on the front wall watching the people who walked up and down the street go past looking at their phones. They all did. Much as I envied every person who had one and who could call their own mother on it, or anyone else, and look up anything at all any time they liked, our mother was right. They did nothing but look at their phones. It made them stumble about. I decided not to envy them.

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.

I so wanted to love this one. The writing was incredibly entertaining and I liked the main characters, I just had no idea what was happening at any given moment. As much as I love a slightly different plot, this one was almost impossible to follow. I ended up staying for the siblings and their characters rather than the plot itself.

'Gliff' by Ali Smith is set in a dystopian time where 'unverifiables' - people who do not fit with the system - are actively segregated and are forced to disappear. The novel is primarily narrated by Briar, who with their sister Rose is left by their mother's partner in an empty house with some money and tins of food. Whilst Briar is technologically advanced and takes charge, Rose's big heart and ability to weave stories draws people and horses to them.

In classic Ali Smith style, works of art, word meanings, animals, politics, and myths and legends are all drawn together in a clever and unsettling way. The reader is left with a lot of questions about what has caused the world to develop in this way, as well as feeling as if it would only take a few steps for the book to match reality. Indeed for some it perhaps already does. As with other recent works Smith has written a second book, 'Glyph', as a companion piece to this one, and it will be interesting to see how it enriches the narrative. This one took me a little while to get into, and for me wasn't quite as entrancing as 'Both' and her seasonal works, but it was still a book I was glad to have read and at times made more emotional than I perhaps would have expected.

"What gliff means:
a short moment. A momentary resemblance. A sudden or chance view. A transient glance. A sudden fright. A faint trace or suggestion. An inkling. A wink of sleep. A slight attack or touch of illness. A whiff. A puff. A sudden perceptible smell. A sudden passing sensation either of pain or of pleasure. A scare. A shock. A thrill. A sudden violent blow. A wallop. A nonsense word. A misspelling for glyph. A substitute word for any word..."

This week I was at Foyles for an event celebrating the Weatherglass Novella Prize, which Ali Smith judged. At one point during the event she expressed her horror of blurbs on books which inevitably, to sell the book, have to tell you something about the story and the setting. In her view the reader should enter a book relatively blind other than the information the author has chosen to give them (cover, title, epigraphs) and puzzle out what the book is about for themselves.

And pre-publication adverts for signed copies of Gliff from booksellers all come with this description of Gliff, and the companion novel Glyph due in 2025:

"The two books will form a new step in Ali’s writing journey, different in form and feeling from the Seasonal Quartet (plus Companion piece) and will look very different too. Ali always keeps her novels under wraps until they are finished, and the surprise of reading a book only when it is complete, knowing almost nothing of its content, is part of the magic."

So, reading an Advanced Review Copy of the novel as I did, courtesy of the publisher via Netgalley, I won't spoil the magic - and simply say - it is indeed both different and truly magical. And yet I suspect the real surprises of this novel (and a 5th star) will only emerge, even to the author, once Glyph is published.

Horses, societal collapse, abandoned children avoiding the authorities - in Gliff we're firmly in dystopian territory, which makes both unsettling and somehow hopeful as perhaps only Ali Smith can pull off. It's quite a challenging read, as we're dropped into an environment that's both strangely unfamiliar and familiar and the novel's themes and concerns only reveal themselves gradually. Being an Ali Smith novel (and like all good books), it's also about writing - the narrator takes about being deluded in "our worded world"; those who evade the surveillance society (which resembles ours) are called "unverifiable"; it is said of the central figure Gliff "It's like you've both named him and let him be completely meaning free". But it's also about the importance of resistance. It seems a companion novel is coming (Glyph) which explores completely different territory. This would fit with the feeling you're left with at the end of Gliff that much is going on elsewhere (action, explanation, speculation) that is being kept from us. A typical Ali Smith move - and an impressive one.

Gliff follows two children who go home and find a line of wet red paint outside their house. This follows a state turned hostile and multiple mentions of horses.

To be completely honest I didn’t understand most of what happened in this. It just felt like words on a page to me that meant nothing. It wasn’t for me at all. It was written well but it just didn’t do anything for me.

Ali Smith’s compelling vision of a not-too-distant future builds on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World but in doing so interrogates, and deftly dismantles, Huxley’s anthropocentric, male-centred perspective. Smith’s narrative’s rooted, if not in the now, in the almost-now, a world whose features closely resemble those of contemporary Britain. It’s primarily presented by Briar or Bri a trans/non-binary teenager looking back at events that totally changed their life. These events unfolded during Bri’s early teens when they lived with their mother, her partner Leif and younger sister Rose. A family emergency led first to their mother’s, and then Leif’s, departure abroad, leaving Bri and Rose in hiding. Like so many of Smith’s protagonists, Bri and Rose are outsiders. Here part of groupings labelled deviant or disruptive by their wider society. Everywhere they go, they’re literally marked out as other - specially-designed machines circling their homes with red paint. They’re known as the Unverified, non-persons who’ve evaded compulsory classificatory systems or those whose origins or actions are deemed aberrant: always in danger of being hunted down via the digital surveillance technologies central to their society’s elaborate control and containment mechanisms. As in Huxley, technology's a key concern.

But, unlike Huxley’s, the structure of Smith’s authoritarian society’s hazy, lacking specificity, gleaned only through its direct impact on individuals like Bri – perhaps because so much of Smith’s setting reconfigures aspects of our crisis-ridden present it’s relatively easy to fill in the blanks. The division between the haves and have-nots is recognisably stark. The wealthy live in a state of oblivion so marked they seem more like figures in a still-life than flesh-and-blood creatures: reliant on a vast underclass to service their needs. These lesser beings are expected to submit to their fate. Anyone who doesn’t can be forcibly dispatched to draconian, re-education facilities - not unlike Huxley’s conditioning centres – or simply disappeared. But the majority willingly submit, becoming complicit in monitoring and disciplining their fellows: often rendered more compliant through drugs in ways that mirror the opioid crisis. Bri and Rose are different, homeschooled by their mother, they’ve been brought up with books not screens, expected to be questioning, to value direct experience over digital substitutions.

Left to their own devices, Rose and Bri encounter a small herd of horses earmarked for the local abattoir, and Rose forms a bond with a grey she calls Gliff. Smith uses Gliff to explore possibilities for kinship and connection which allow for the acceptance of difference and unknowability; opening up questions of speciesism, relations between human and non-human. All of which gradually intersects with an exploration of issues around climate change, environmental blight, and the destructive power of global conglomerates. As in earlier works, Smith’s vigorously critiquing contemporary capitalism: its precarity and inhumane work practices; the dangerous sweatshops and gruelling production lines that feed its rampant consumerism. But she’s also interested in themes around transience, moments of monumental change not dissimilar to the move from the pre-industrial to industrial societies; the flow of history, directions taken, directions that might still be possible. Although Bri and Rose’s future appears bleak, there are glimpses of light, pockets of resistance in the form of organisations like The Campions. The faint chance that fluidity might overcome fixity and conformity.

In comparison to other Smith novels, Gliff’s less explicitly formally innovative. It’s a lot more accessible, less intricate, more linear, more direct. But it’s quintessentially Smith in its themes and preoccupations, with a renewed emphasis on storytelling as a force for change. Smith’s narrative's rife with her trademark wordplay, intertextuality, and multiplicity of influences. There are direct and indirect references taken from art and art history; and to the work of writers like Alan Garner, Max Frisch, and H. G. Wells. Fragmented episodes owe a debt to Orwell’s dystopian narrative as much as to Huxley’s. Imagery and symbolism from mythology, fairy lore and fairy tales surfaces throughout. Bri and Rose’s names stem from an ancient folk ballad but equally conjure “Little Briar Rose” – the Grimms’ telling of “Sleeping Beauty”; and the pre-Raphaelite “Briar Rose” cycle. Here Briar Rose’s unaccountably awake yet surrounded by sleepwalkers incapable of comprehending reality’s perils. Smith’s political analysis could be a tad obvious at times; and the digital versus analogue debates didn’t quite work for me – felt uncomfortably close to Luddite. But I found her central characters sympathetic and was increasingly bound up in their plight. This has a satisfying ending but not a conclusive one, there’s a second instalment to follow – I’m excited to find out where that will lead.

As always beautifully written.
Smith never disappoints.
A dystopian tale set in the not so far future. With two excellent young characters at the forefront of the story.
I can't say everything was crystal clear for me by the end, so pleased to see there's a second book.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the arc.

When everything feels eerily familiar but also extremely unfamiliar in what can only be described as baffling, that is Ali Smith’s writing. I went into this not realising that it was somewhat dystopian, which I think added to the surrealism. If you want to feel disoriented but lose yourself in what can only be described as literary art then read Gliff. Nevertheless, like with a lot of her work, I spend so much of the book trying to figure out what is actually going on and what is meaningful and meaningless (woah, that reflects some of this book’s themes!) that it can be a bit of a headache. Despite that, there is just something so unique and beautiful about everything she writes, including this!