Unverifiable unverifiable unverifiable: in Ali Smith’s new novel, two young siblings navigate the powers and failings of language in a dystopian future.
Gliff, by Ali Smith,
Pantheon Books, 273 pages, $28
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Imagine a place and time in which rivers and seas are being poisoned by corporate entities that sweetly proclaim their environmental scruples while hiking prices and defending their state-granted monopolies. Picture a nation where your local hospital is partly run by the people who also take away your trash. Where you can ride the bus, or catch a train, or hire a bicycle . . . or get yourself locked up in prison (where you may or may not be served maggots at dinner), or find yourself sexually abused at an “immigration removal center”—all courtesy one private company, whose close competitors may asphyxiate you in your airplane seat as they try to deport you. Here is a country whose own citizens can be made stateless unpersons by government fiat, where a climate protestor in her seventies may languish in jail for months because nobody can find a medically suitable electronic tag to attach to a limb and let her go. Oh to be in England, in the early decades of our century.
So much for the actual state of things in Britain. Ali Smith’s new novel, Gliff, is apparently set in the future, beyond ecological and political breakdown, but dystopia here reads very much like J. G. Ballard’s definition of his science fiction: a history of the next five minutes. Smith’s child protagonists, the nonbinary narrator Briar and their sister Rose, have grown up in a world only subtly perverted from the declining arc of contemporary Britain, but have so far been sheltered from some of its worst aspects. They meet a boy called Colon—one of several absurd names in a novel partly about the absurdity of naming—who refers to his smartwatch as his “educator” and is amazed his new friends have instead learned about the world from the world itself. Schools and libraries lie abandoned, basic utilities work intermittently, and state (or are they corporate?) operatives roam about with “supera bounder” machines that paint red lines around buildings, objects, or people marked for disappearance. Bureaucratic euphemism pervades this society; one might at any moment be judged “unverifiable.”
Briar and Rose have been left to fend for themselves—their mother goes to work at a hotel which may not be a hotel, and her partner Leif has left too. Their house has had a red line drawn around it, meant to contain the inhabitants as if they were plague-ridden, before demolition. The siblings explore a semi-desolate landscape, which is where they encounter Colon (whom they rename Colin), an older activist called Oona, and a horse they call Gliff—the name, says Briar, is “really excitingly polysemous.” Smith gives us a short chapter of definitions for this neologism, including: “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. A synonym for spliff.” Rose and Briar spend a lot of time nickering about the right names for things, and about the implications of being named in the first place, which seems an assertion of ownership. “Unverifiable unverifiable unverifiable. I thought of us in the worded world.”
The problem of naming—I’m suddenly reminded of the chapter on names and their perils in Tristram Shandy (1759)—is in Gliff partly an anxiety about nature, its destruction as much by language as by whatever forces have laid waste to the world. Alongside Gliff, the novel contains a parable about a girl born with the head of a horse, and the miraculous powers she exhibits before she too is rendered unverifiable. After nameless officials take her away, her family and others rise up. “Not just the people. All the creatures did too and the rocks, the stones, the grass, the seas, the rivers, the weeds, were angry at the way they’d been treated, and the weather was furious . . .” Joining the revolution of the natural world is the detritus it has been misused to produce: plastics and computers and phones and poisonous batteries—all of it forms a landslide and slides “to a stop only to stop up every door of every place where anyone thought they were in charge of the world.”
This fable is one of the tools Smith uses to enrich and elaborate her central dystopic narrative. Gliff vibrates with citation and allusion, other stories of sudden or slow apocalypse sprouting like weeds among the ruins. (“Weeds are just flowers or plants that people have decided to call weeds because people decide they don’t want them there, my sister said.”) There are chapters titled with punning variations on the title of Aldous Huxley’s best-known novel—“Brave old world . . . Brave you world, Brave now world”—which in turn evoked Shakespeare’s The Tempest: another work about the power of words over nature. Smith directly invokes Max Frisch’s 1979 novella Man in the Holocene, whose aging and solitary protagonist thinks hard about knowledge and nature and spends his days naming the types of thunder.
A little of this playful, referential quality goes a long way with book reviewers, who tend to either disparage or revere Smith as if her novels were made only of ideas and experiment and jocose literary reflexivity. It is true that even in the titles and the order in which they are published, her books may seem ruled by conceit or constraint. Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), Spring (2019), and Summer (2020) compose a state-of-the nation tetralogy that roughly coincides with the period from the hysterical Brexit vote to its cynical implementation. Gliff will be followed later in 2025 by Glyph: a “sister novel” that tells a story hidden in the first. I’ve just recalled that Glyph was also the name of a journal of “textual studies” in the late 1970s; but such echoes and citations shouldn’t distract from the fact that Smith’s fiction is also wittily and movingly accessible. Gliff is another tale about a Britain (and not only Britain) bound for environmental ruin, techno-despotism, and a jargon of atrocity—but it’s also filled, like its narrator and their sister, with invention and revolt.
Brian Dillon’s Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, and Essayism are published by New York Review Books. He is working on Ambivalence: An Education.