Review: Gliff by Ali Smith
Technology, uncertainty and an air of transient horror runs through this first part of a duology.
Ali Smith’s writing always attempts to reshape how fiction is written in English. From her Seasonal Quartet (2016-2020), that captured Britain following the EU referendum, to this new duology, she writes for change and to lay bare the problems that plague the contemporary world. Gliff, the first book which appeared in 2024, will be followed by Glyff later this year.
Smith is known for writing stories that lie at the intersection of horror and reality. Her idea of horror, however, is not a ghost or a supernatural element that kills and massacres. Her spectre is human. In Gliff, we encounter the control of technology, the haunting spirit of uncertainty and the State as horror. The elder sibling remembers their mother saying, ‘My life?… It’s a puzzle all right and right now solving it is out of my hands.’ To a revolutionary resisting the machines making the red lines, the child asks, ‘And why do they want us to feel so temporary?’ The quietness that predominates the narrative brilliantly captures the world turning upside down as viewed through the eyes of a child. Like Smith’s 2005-novel The Accidental where perspectives of different members of a family recount the visit of a stranger to their house, an air of transient horror runs through Gliff too.
As with the author’s earlier work, the elements that particularly stand out here are structure and technique. Smith has a tendency to break rules in writing just like her characters, who are intent on dissolving the idea of the normal, the structured, and the functional. Here, the story runs like a private conversation, or a confession recorded in a journal. Disjointed threads of dialogues, pages that read like poetry, and sudden time jumps can all be tricky to work with. In the Booker-shortlisted Held by Anna Michaels, for instance, these make the story stand on shaky foundations. Smith’s skills, however, soar when she employs them. Both as a reader and writer, her sensitivity to the text, characters and plot ensures that readers are glued to her books. Hers is a world that comes alive through her characters. Unlike the deep immersion of the world only through its objects in a Murakami novel, Smith’s world constructs itself in the minds of its reader through the siblings who encounter horses, songs and singers of an unknown world, words which escape meaning and rooms that were once classrooms. The narrative, the world building and the structure all ensure that Gliff is connected to its characters. The bleakness, however, stays with the reader. ‘So I’ve spent the last five years of my life not letting myself think any of this,’ says the elder sibling who is the narrator. This comes at a point where readers have met the siblings and also realise that things have not stayed the same for the two. Of course, we do eventually learn what happens but the author does not spell things out. The subtlety with which the extremeness of youth is juxtaposed with the terror of authoritarianism lingers long after the novel is over.
It is clear that Smith is looking for the existentialist moment of reckoning in a world gone astray. Cormac McCarthy delves into this in The Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, and Halldor Laxness does it too in Under the Glacier (1968).
However, Smith leaves many questions unanswered in this work that engulfs you in remorse, grief, loss, and quietude. Some characters do not return and the reader is left hanging about what happens to them. Towards the end, Smith writes, ‘We’ll be making it up as we go,’ and the reader agrees because the task of a novel is to tell a story without making it obvious. Ali Smith’s readers are now waiting for Glyff. The only real complaint they can possibly have about the author is that she hasn’t written more.
Rahul Singh is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Presidency University, Kolkata. He is @fook_bood on Instagram and @rahulzsing on X.