Green and Pleasant Land
The narrator of Ali Smith’s new novel, Gliff, is a thirteen-year-old named Briar. Various critics have thought Briar to be either male, female, or non-binary, and some have declined the question and referred to Briar as “he or she.” This confusion is intended by Smith. In any case, Briar and a younger sister named Rose live somewhere in the future, seemingly Britain, under totalitarian arrangements, though with only intermittent adult supervision because they are separated from their mother and her boyfriend, Leif. Their brave mother blew the whistle on her employer, a weedkiller company, and now Briar and Rose, evicted from their home, are “unverifiables,” people with no records who are nonetheless watched and, as much as possible, controlled. They give false names and watch for where the cameras and microphones are; smart phones and watches are now more blatantly instruments of volunteered surveillance, and some civilians are vigilantes.
Climate change has brought April temperatures up into the forties (centigrade), and British children have been put back to work, suffering burns as they try to remove lithium from old batteries. It’s all a bit grim, but there are fleeting joys to be had, or as precocious Briar will learn to call them, “gliffs,” as in sudden passing sensations of pleasure, such as when a gelding which the siblings will adopt and name “Gliff” eats some grass and the air is filled with “strange sweetness,” or, going in circles here, when Briar discovers in the library of an abandoned sixth form college the many definitions of “gliff,” including a “sudden perceptible smell.”
A “gliff” can be a scare, too. Gliff doesn’t have any of those, not for its presumably grownup readers, but then again the implied ideal reader of this novel, both dreamy and alert to injustice, is of ambiguous age. There is more than a hint of the fairytale about the story of Briar and Rose, whose names are already folkloric. Gliff the horse doesn’t talk, but you sense that he knows the score. In taking care of him, they meet two brothers, one good boy unluckily named Colon who resists the regime and helps them, and another very nasty one named Posho. Smith doesn’t write in many details or textures, and the dystopia is already stripped of comforts and color, and this sparsity evokes the simplified narration of the child’s tale. Briar’s voice, a mightily impressive performance by Smith, has the sing-song, repetitious shaping of the young, with the relish for wordplay and the keen curiosity about definitions and rules. Sheltering in an abandoned home found for them by Leif before he goes to fetch mother, Briar imagines all the minute detritus that falls in the gaps between floorboards over the centuries, a “completely different sort of matter, the kind people say doesn’t matter when they talk about what history is.” The child’s thought, Smith tries to show, is sophisticated: just as matter can matter, “gliff” can be a verb too, meaning to strike a quick blow or evade something. These are the ways Briar, and as it turns out Rose, can fight the system, with hit and run tactics. There is help from some more experienced “unverifiables,” but in a story with no prince they will have to be plucky.
The novel somehow channels liberal doomerism while keeping its fairytale lightness for well over a hundred pages. This is impressive, too. But then, beginning with the section titled “power,” something gives out, and there are fanciful, italicized stories within the story, as well as more direct references to political causes in our own time. It is as if an emulsion has broken into its less enticing ingredients. Briar and Rose are taken in by a group of unverifiables, who have both exotic names like Arkan or Valentina, and special reasons for their outcast status, from “writing online that the killing of many people by another people was a genocide” or “speaking at a protest about people’s right to protest” (notice how the childish repetition persists through this more programmatic political language). Some of the loose chatter, now that there are more children running around, becomes twee, especially from Rose, who tells an unverifiable girl named Daisy that “every daisy is made up not just of one flowerhead but of really loads of little flowerheads.” Finally, perhaps unavoidably, given how the web of intratextual references is thickening, Smith assists the reader in seeing the important connections with that most dispiriting of novelistic devices, the series of rhetorical questions: “Why were my sister and I so careful and keen to evade when we told people are names? Evade what? Why did we so often naturally know to tell them names that weren’t our names at all, and why did doing this leave us reeling with happiness . . .”
Fortunately, the language games are there to amuse us all through the novel: Smith finds a kind of punchline, if not an actual pun, between a false pair of doublets, when Briar looks in Gliff’s beautiful eye and feels what years later she will know to call “equanimity.” The science fiction trappings, in particular, are lightened and thus improved by their polysemy. A lawnmower-like machine which paints red lines to expel unverifiables from their homes is called a “supera bounder” (a “bounder” being British slang for a dishonorable man). I wonder, though, if Smith has been limited, either by herself or by editors, and not allowed much of the subtler wordplay and bespoke usage that can enliven the simplest description. Early in the novel, she has Briar watching some flowers that “dried away to something nearly nothing and blew nothingly around in the paved yard.” Why isn’t there more of this kind of thing? The puns and soundalikes that repeat throughout the novel, e.g. a riff about solving vs. salving, turn eventually into slogans through which motivations are announced and images brought back through association, but along the way, there could have been more invention in the quieter moments. If I were really cynical, I might think that the author is keeping her eyes on the prize—she’s been shortlisted for the Booker four times—which tends to go to novels that render their anxious political message in simpler, more “urgent” prose.
A companion novel, rather than a sequel, called Glyph (“a signifying mark, as in ‘hieroglyph”’), will be arriving late this year, and “will tell a story that is hidden in the first.” Readers will look for that story now, in the pages of Gliff, but they should note the indefinite article in that second bit of ad copy. What story is hidden here, of a sort that probably won’t be filled out in the next novel? Well, the thuggish police who seize Briar late in the story call their captive a “cretin,” which as Smith is more likely to know than most authors, comes from crétin, a dialect form of chrétien, i.e. Christian.
At that sixth form college, named after a mystical St Saccobanda, Briar’s revolutionary mentors make a lot of an 18th century painting of a horse menaced by a lion that represents Roman might. Briar, retrained by the regime, seems to lose all conviction, even all faith, but then is brought back to talk of “unbelievable believable hope.” And among its many other meanings “gliff” is defined by Briar for Rose with a phrase out of Corinthians, “The twinkling of an eye,” the time it takes for everything to be transformed. If you think the world’s going to heat up and turn to hell, and the only game is running away from the bad policemen and occasionally pricking them with your thorns, and you’re sure that’s all there is, you probably can’t write a novel like Gliff. One more glimpse: “Gliff,” Briar has told us, is also “a substitute word for any other word.” Thank Gliff Smith hasn’t ruled out a better world.
Kazuo Robinson is a writer based in New York. His reviews have been published in Cleveland Review of Books, The New Criterion, and The Oxonian Review. He maintains a Substack at kazuorobinson.substack.com where he writes all about fiction.
