Fiction: ‘Gliff' by Ali Smith

Wall Street Journal

30-01-2025

'Language is like poppies,' says a character in Ali Smith's 'Autumn,' from 2016. 'It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about.' This is the impression cultivated in the splendid botanical gardens of Ms. Smith's fiction, where words bloom and flourish in their many definitions, both known and newly invented. The characters in her books—most of them preternaturally clever young people—are forever offering up coinages and wordplay ('Such good pun we're having,' riffs a woman in her 2011 novel 'There but for the.') They are constantly interrupting the action to look things up in the dictionary.
'It was always exciting to me the number of things a single word could mean,' enthuses Bri, the narrator of Ms. Smith's 'Gliff.' But this novel, set in a totalitarian future in what appears to be Great Britain, is about the ways that language can be policed and abused. Bri and Rose are siblings who have become separated from their mother and are hiding from authorities in an abandoned cottage. They belong to the forcibly dispossessed class that authorities have dubbed 'unverifiables,' referring to citizenship status but also encompassing anyone who criticizes the government or utters taboo words. Ms. Smith's 'brave new unlibraried world' is an allegorical techno-dystopia in which meaning is violently regulated and imagination proscribed.
Bri, whose gender is nonbinary (Bri is short for either Briar or Brice), is the older and more cautious of the siblings. Rose, more impulsive and passionate, has the idea of rescuing a neighboring horse who is bound for the slaughterhouse. She calls the animal Gliff, a name that Rose believes she has made up but which Bri discovers is an old Scottish word for, among many other things, a brief moment or fleeting glance. The mad, improvised act of freedom in caring for the horse, which leads to the siblings' capture, presages the chapters devoted to their grown-up fates, in which Bri, re-educated and assigned as male, becomes a soulless cog in the system while Rose escapes to lead an underground resistance movement.
The linguistic wildness of Ms. Smith's writing, always a joyful signature of her books, contrasts effectively with the state's urge to restrict speech and silo the population into fixed and exclusionary categories. But elsewhere the novel's spirit of childlike wonder shades into the sort of didacticism customary to children's books. Authorities claim the property of unverifiables by painting red lines around it, a simplistic symbol of the repressive power of borders. The characters are either courageous freethinkers or cruel, jargon-spouting drones. Tyranny has little interest in nuance, so perhaps 'Gliff' is merely being faithful to its black-and-white outlook. But Ms. Smith's great strength is her grasp of the strangeness and multiplicity of language. It seems wasteful to display those virtues in a story whose meanings are all so plain.