Gliff

Ali Smith’s Gliff is set in a future Britain that is under surveillance and environmental collapse. The story is about two siblings (their names Briar and Rose) who live off grid, undocumented and labeled as ‘unverifiable’, making them targets for capture. Some of the story revolves around their series of physical displacement, but the broader story is more about language, freedom, identity, and resistance. As you read you’ll gain a sense that the world Rose and Briar occupte is one of a surveillance state that our current world is slowly moving towards.

There isn’t a complete answer as to how the world ended up this way, and that does bring a sense of realism for Briar and Rose’s perspective, since it’s a world in which they barely have all the details. I got the sense that it was very much like the outskirts of society in 1984 or along those lines, since there is a lot of double speak in the jargon and language.

At some point Rose meets a horse in the book and names it ‘Gliff’, and Briar comments that it sounds like ‘Glyph’, and that the word perfectly describes the horse as ‘something unpindownable’ since a glyph is a ‘substitute for any word’. At some point you notice how Briar refers to themselves in a non-binary way, indicating Brian is hard to pindown as well. That theme is extended into a scene where Briar escapes a plot of the system they live in, or how their name is sometimes Bri or Brice and not just Briar. A couple of quotes from Briar hold this up:

“It was always exciting to me the number of things a single word could mean”

“my briar self is back, prickly and twined”

You’ll enjoy reading this if you are interested in dystopian settings, some mystery, like books such as 1984 or Fahrenheit 451. Overall, I felt Gliff is a smart book, and that Ali Smith treats her readers with great wordplay and language, but ultimately I was hoping to learn more about this world and felt it was incomplete. I do hope the follow up novel Glyph expands upon the story!