It would be hard to find a writer whose sensibility is better suited to unsettling times than British novelist Ali Smith. Unsurprisingly, her novel Gliff neatly matches the dominant sentiment of the 2020s. This brief, dystopian tale is both an evocative story of siblings in peril and a glimpse at where some of the trends roiling our world may be taking us.
Set in an unnamed country in an unspecified future time, the novel follows two children forced to navigate a threatening environment without the benefit of an adult presence. After their mother departs to care for her ailing sister, the narrator, known variously as Briar, Brice and Bri, is abandoned with younger sister Rose by the friend whose care their mother placed them in.
Before long, the sisters are at large in a society marked by environmental degradation, omnipresent surveillance focused on a category of dissidents known as “unverifiables,” and an ominous machine called a supera bounder that randomly paints red lines around properties to mark them for destruction. Setting themselves at odds with the oppressive ethos of this culture, Briar and Rose quickly learn to survive using their wits and a handful of opportunistic alliances.
As in much of Smith’s work, there’s a pleasing fascination with language and wordplay. “It was always exciting to me the number of things a single word could mean,” says Briar. That curiosity extends to the eponymous word, gliff, whose meaning apparently encompasses everything from “a transient glance” to “an early AI tech tool used in the development of healthcare.” It’s also the name Rose gives to a horse that’s one of several she liberates from their corral and then makes her own.
The feeling one experiences reading Gliff is similar to that evoked when standing before an abstract impressionist work of art. Smith’s novel is less about creating fully fleshed-out characters or a meticulously structured plot than it is about summoning up a mood, one of “Unbelievable believable hope. . . . Impossible, possible.” That attitude offers what might serve as Smith’s paradoxical benediction over life in an increasingly anxious age.
