A vision of a terrible future – so how close are we to it?

This is the story of siblings Briar and Rose who, like Hansel and Gretel, have been abandoned, albeit with a supply of tinned foods intended to last them until their mother’s boyfriend – “the nicest one so far” – can bring her home and reunite the family.

Briar is about 13, Rose a good bit younger, but there is nothing childish about either. Rather, their perceptions are sharp and, in Rose’s case, their use and mischievous misuse of language is precocious. It is through Rose that  Smith expresses her love of words and their malleability. Indeed, at the heart of this novel is the idea of what words and language mean, and how that meaning can shape individuals and their fate.   

“Are you a boy or a girl?”, someone asks Briar. “Yes I am,” is the reply, creating only one of the many ambiguities and dualities in a fleet-footed tale that carries an echo of Angela Carter and her subversive fiction. No doubt many will also find shades of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, not to mention Margaret Atwood, in Smith’s dystopian landscape.

The location is an unspecified country, similar to the UK, the time not many years from now. People are in thrall to a harsh regime in which ethnicity, homelessness, creed and disability – as well as criticising or contradicting the authorities – make people “unverifiables” or outcasts, in peril of their lives. “Why are they trying to render us so temporary?” asked the children’s mother before the story begins. If she didn’t know, the reader does.

In this unspeakably cruel world, children are maimed and killed extracting lithium from batteries by hand, and “fresh” young folk are abused in ways Smith’s main narrator, Briar, declines to specify, preferring to forget these experiences.

It doesn’t take the children long to understand the  nature of the “Brave New World” they must negotiate, a phrase Smith rather irritatingly plays with throughout (“Brave You World”, “Brave New Word”, or with dropped letters, “ rave new o ld” etc). Their awakening comes when they arrive home to discover that a line of red paint encircles the house. The makeshift paint machine, called a supera bounder – “Spindly, cheap, high pitched, very offtune” – is marking out the homes of undesirables, after which their property is pulled down. The supera bounder is comically amateurish but this serves to underline the ease with which the state can terrify people into submission or, better still, disappearance.

(Image: Gliff, by Ali Smith)

Not that we don’t play a part in our own diminishment, as Smith points out. Briar recalls their mother likening smart phones to the 1980s craze for mechanical toys that needed to be regularly fed: “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.”

Gliff is recounted, five years after the events it depicts, by Briar, now officially called Mr Allan Dale and in charge of a delivery and packaging depot so exploitative it makes child labour in Victorian factories look benevolent.

Smith’s fictional world is a caricature of present-day ails, a place in which all brakes on discrimination, brutality and environmental devastation have been removed. It’s a regime where the powerless have no voice, and nor do wild things. Birdsong is a thing of the past, as are wild flowers.

And yet, as Rose and Briar’s lives prove, resistance against maniacal capitalism, opportunism, greed and totalitarian bullying is possible, at a cost. Fighting against a state that defines people by the information it holds on them requires stealth, courage and fortitude, but can be done.

Appropriately, it is an animal that shows them this possibility. Rescuing a horse bound for the abattoir, Rose calls him Gliff. This name is central to the essence of the novel, and Smith delivers a definition that runs to a couple of pages. In brief, it is the Scots word for a short moment, a sudden fright, a thrill, and lots more besides. Building on this theme, Smith’s forthcoming companion novel to Gliff will be titled Glyph, no doubt causing confusion when ordering a copy of either by phone. Perhaps that’s the point.

Read more

Hauntingly truthful novel skewers the cruelties of the British elite

Driving is not a right: older drivers must prove their abilities

The introduction of an animal as powerful, beautiful and mythically significant as a horse broadens the scope of the novel to embrace all of nature. As their relationship with the horse deepens, they wonder if having a name makes any difference to an animal that does not use language: “Was a horse more lost to the world, because of no words, or was the horse more found – or even founded – in the world because of no words?”

Ali Smith’s ability to combine the fantastical with down-to-earth detail – such as the complications of hiding a horse in a house – gives a depth to her observations that feels if not precisely visionary then urgent. Although many are already uncomfortably aware of the danger presented by those with untrammelled power, or by humanity’s heedless ruination of nature. To that extent, Gliff is not broaching new territory.

Smith’s fascination with language and its possibilities is a trademark, but, for me, it sometimes acts as a barrier. Her writing and voice are beguiling as ever, but while this novel’s premise is intriguing, it feels like an intellectual exercise-cum fable.

Yet who could not be interested to find out what happens to these stranded youngsters? And who could fail to see the parallels with our own times, writ large? Who, for that matter, could put down Gliff without wondering how far down the slippery slope to disaster we have already slipped?