Book Review: ‘Gliff,’ by Ali Smith

GLIFF, by Ali Smith

A “glyph” is a character — the alphabetical kind. “Gliff,” the title of Ali Smith’s new novel, isn’t just a variant spelling; it’s the name of a horse that plays an important role in the story, so a character in a different sense. The word is also something of a character in its own right.

Gliff, a gelding marked for slaughter, is given his name by Rose, the younger of two siblings making their perilous way across a cruel and blighted near-future landscape. Briar, a bit older than Rose and the narrator of this spiky, soulful book, finds other meanings for “gliff” in a dictionary in an abandoned library. One of them is “a substitute word for any word.”

“You’ve given him a name that can stand in for, or represent, any other word, any word that exists,” an excited Briar tells Rose. “Or ever existed. Or will. Because of what you called him, he can be everything and anything. And at the same time his name can mean nothing at all. It’s like you’ve both named him and let him be completely meaning-free!”

This idea of freedom — the possibility of moving through the world unconfined by a single, determinate category, able to swap identities or shed them altogether — is both Smith’s great theme and a description of her methods. Her books are restless, shape-changing, multifarious enterprises, scrambling conventional definitions of genre.

“Polysemous” is another word Briar discovers that offers a clue to Smith’s intentions. The right to be that way — to mean differently, to be numerous in oneself and connected to other people according to intricate, improvised, surprising patterns of solidarity — is a central political principle in Smith’s work, threading through fascinating hybrids like “Artful” and “How to Be Both” and the of-the-moment, already classic novels of the Seasonal Quartet.

“Gliff” isn’t quite as ablaze with formal daring as those defiantly unclassifiable books. For all its chronological fracturing and stylistic play, it follows many of the familiar tropes and beats of dystopian Y.A. fiction.

A soulless system, empowered by supposedly benevolent technologies of surveillance, data collection and quantification, has captured the population of what seems to be Britain, intensifying old inequalities and inventing new ones.

People who fall or wriggle through the cracks are labeled “unverifiable,” hunted down and subjected to re-education, forced labor and worse. Those who give voice to dissenting opinions or inconvenient truths can be “unverified.” A vindictive totalitarian order masquerades as the rule of reason.

Briar and Rose, separated from their freethinking mother, adrift and bewildered, are in constant danger of being captured. Even so, some of their childlike qualities — Rose’s pluck and imagination, Briar’s wary curiosity — equip them not only for survival, but for resistance too.

The idea that children — especially those in early adolescence or on the verge of it — are natural enemies of authoritarianism is an axiom of much modern speculative fiction. Their ethical instincts incline them to defy unjust rules that their lively minds enable them to outwit. Whether or not this assumption is true, we would have a lot less recent literature without it. No “Uglies,” no “Divergent,” no “Hunger Games.”

But Smith, who is officially writing for grown-ups (though also manifestly for precocious explorers of library shelves), folds “Gliff” into a much older tradition. Rose and Briar possess names that conjure a world of ballads and folk tales. (Combine them and you get an alternate title of the Brothers Grimm story better known as “Sleeping Beauty.”) Briar’s narrative of bravery and betrayal is interrupted here and there by fables — one about a woman who gives birth to a baby with a horse’s head, another about a tyrant driven mad by vengeance — that point to lessons and supply a glimmer, a gliff, of magic.

Smith’s prose, as ever, is the principal enchantment: profane, playful, perpetually alert to the pleasures and serendipity of words, a spark she bestows on Briar and Rose. When they meet a boy named Colon, Rose asks if he has a little brother called Semi. “Or are you named after an ancestor’s intestines?”

“It was always exciting to me the number of things a single word could mean,” Briar notes, even if some of those meanings turn out to be grim. The word that inspires this thought is “render,” which Briar’s mother had used to pose a dire question about her circumstances: “Why are they trying to render us so temporary?” In the world as Briar encounters it, people are used and used up, reduced to laboring bodies and captive minds.

Among the definitions Briar finds for “render” are “to extract by melting” and “a return due from a feudal tenant to his lord.” The word can also mean “to cause to be or become” and “to reproduce by artistic or verbal means.” I don’t want to spoil either the details of Smith’s world-building or the turns of her plot, but I can say that she renders an awakening consciousness and the terrible reality in which it is embedded with faultless grace and dexterity.

Fairy tales and dystopian visions are vehicles of terror, but even more so of comfort. As long as the story lasts, as long as the young heroes and heroines are in narrative motion, the protective spell cast over the reader will hold and hope will be available.

After that, of course, we might feel bereft, abandoned, anxious. Luckily, Smith’s next book is already on the way. It’s called “Glyph.”

GLIFF | By Ali Smith | Pantheon | 273 pp. | $28