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!