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Ali Smith's ‘Gliff' provides a terrifying glimpse into our possible future

Related : Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Both timelines contain aspects of our world, though your perception of today — your political views, your version of facts (an utterly demoralizing phrase to type) — will determine how exaggerated you think the novel's characterization is, how far off you think its future lies. Those in power have begun seizing both property, by surrounding it with a line of red paint, and people, by identifying them as 'unverifiables.' Speaking out at a protest, posting something inappropriate online, loving the wrong person, having the wrong skin color — any of these can get someone tagged as UV and sent to a 'Retraining Center.' Both the kids' mother, who takes over her ailing sister's service industry job at the start of the novel, and Leif, the mother's latest boyfriend, disappear off the page after presumably being caught up in this system. Advertisement Before Leif vanishes, both the family's home and camper van are encircled with red paint, so he sets the kids up with two weeks of canned food in an abandoned railworkers cottage. Rose finds a field of horses behind their squat and befriends — and soon adopts — a gray gelding that she names Gliff. It's a seemingly nonsense word, but Briar later learns that it has a slew of portentous meanings, including 'a short moment' and 'a sudden passing sensation either of pain or of pleasure.' Smith's writing always features an almost palpable love of language, which takes a variety of guises here, including other discussions about the multiple meanings of apposite words like trust, rendering, and sublime, as well as whimsical wordplay throughout the text, like the mother's oft-quoted aphorism that a problem that can't be solved must be 'salved.' Advertisement Toward the end of the earlier narrative, the siblings — and their horse — resettle in an abandoned school that shelters other displaced children and adults, including a former librarian and a renowned philosopher who had 'been made stateless.' Colon, whose father owns the horses, initially tries to gather data on the siblings using the 'educator' that he, like most licit citizens, wears on his wrist. Rose and Briar have no devices and were raised to be skeptical of technology in general, especially the ways it has further fractured society. When Colon asks the siblings how they learn, Briar says, 'We choose to be educated by things bigger than something so small it can be worn on a human wrist.' In the later timeline, technology plays an even more prominent and destabilizing role, with an individual's entire existence dictated by their digital footprint and many children bearing chemical burns caused by their work removing batteries from discarded electronics. Related : Advertisement Like all of Smith's recent novels, though to a lesser degree than in the Seasonal Quartet, 'Gliff' is enriched by references to literature, art, and history, including Edgar Allan Poe, British painter George Stubbs, and the caves at Creswell Crags, which were first occupied by humans tens of thousands of years ago. These older, scholastic touchstones are outweighed by the novel's endless nods to more recent events. Some are specific, including allusions to Israel's demolition of Gaza and Vladimir Putin's presumed role in the death of Alexei Navalny; others are more general, such as deteriorating societal norms, extreme weather events, unaccountable business behemoths, rampant electronic surveillance, deadly painkiller addictions, and the ability of money to buy permission and bypass regulation. Tying together and, to a large degree, enabling these ills are the increasingly powerful people who are threatened by the mere existence of those who are different, those 'they think aren't anything like them.' The novel was initially published in the UK in October 2024, and while its vision of the future looks even more prescient today, particularly in the United States, hopefully 'Gliff' will remain a cautionary tale and not be revealed as a glimpse into a crystal ball. GLIFF By Ali Smith Pantheon, 288 pages, $28 Cory Oldweiler is a freelance writer. Advertisement