Books Read: Gliff by Ali Smith

This isn’t a bad novel, but it’s not her best work.

2024 has been a perfectly cromulent but not outstanding year for literature.¹ Ali Smith is symptomatic of this. I think she’s a magnificent writer, one of the few using fiction to voice her anger at the rise in populism in the West. That she’s playful, funny and a bit experimental only elevates my love for her work.

And yet, I was lukewarm about her new novel Gliff—the first in a duology where the second novel will apparently tease out a story hidden in the first book.²

Gliff is set at an undisclosed point in the future where society, fuelled by pernicious algorithms, has taken on a distinctly dystopian hue. Our protagonists are siblings Briar and Rose, who, early in the piece, become homeless after their house is marked with a red border, signifying that they are “unverifiable”—meaning they have no rights as citizens. Briar and Rose become members of an underclass striving to carve out a limited sort of freedom amongst the labour camps and algorithms.

The writing is beautiful. There are moments where Smith’s fury is shocking in its vividness. There’s a passage about a third of the way through where Colon (the boy Rose and Briar meet whose father owns a horse the siblings have taken a liking to) reads out the questions of a survey to determine citizenship. It’s a long list, a suffocating barrage of questions, intimidating, dehumanising, terrifying. But the algorithms are hungry for data. How else will they learn to categorise and break us down into our consitutent elements?

And, while I don’t fully understand the stuff with the horse, or for that matter all the talk about the word “Gliff” (which is Scottish for a faint trace or a sudden fright), there’s a strangeness to it that I liked, that separates Smith from so many authors who play it safe.

But. Her dystopia is bland and uninteresting. It’s Terry Gilliam’s Brazil but without Gilliam’s grotesque aesthetic. Perhaps this is deliberate. Maybe we’re meant to yawn at how cliched and anodyne it is with labour camps and constant surveillance and everyone and everything surrounded in a dull metal grey. But, it’s hard to invest or care about the underlying message, how we’re allowing our leaders to rob us of our identity, uniqueness, and culture, when the threat has no heft, when the dystopia is laughably simplistic. If this is the point, then it’s a point that has fallen flat with me.

Or maybe, just maybe, I’ve read far too many dystopian novels.

1. I liked plenty of contemporary novels written this year. Absolution, State of Paradise, Martyr! The Repeat Room and Headshot are all excellent. But overall quality this year doesn’t hold a candle to last year.

2. So, not a sequel but a story within a story?