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The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published February 12, 2025
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published February 12, 2025
ISSN: 1930-0018
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Literary Fiction
Historical Fiction
Short Stories
Essays
Thrillers
Romance
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Biography/Memoir
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Science, Health and the Environment
Poetry & Novels in Verse
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Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
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From a literary master, a moving and genre-bending story about our era-spanning search for meaning and knowing.
An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world.
Add two children. And a horse.
From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavour to make a mark on the world. In a time when western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data—something easily categorizable and predictable—Smith shows us why our humanity, our individual complexities, matter more than ever.
Excerpt
Gliff
Our mother came down to the docking gate to say cheerio to us. For a moment I didn't recognize her. I thought she was just a woman working at the hotel. She had her hair scraped back off her face and tied in a ponytail and she was wearing clothes so unlike her and so not quite right for her shape that it took me that moment to work out they were her sister's work clothes, the uniform they made the women and girls here wear, white shirt, long black pinafore apron/ skirt thing. The men and boys who worked here got to look more casual. Their uniform was designer jeans and white T-shirts made of stuff that was better than what ordinary T-shirts get made of. The women and girls weren't allowed make up or earrings or necklaces. Our mother looked smaller, duller, scrubbed clean and cloistery, like serving women from humbled countries look in films on TV.
How is she doing today? Leif asked.
How long will she be ill? my own sister asked.
Our mother gave my sister a look for being rude.
Two weeks, Leif said, three? As long as till September?
The far away word September hung in the air round us in the weird tradespeople space. My sister looked at her feet. Leif looked at the walls, concrete and stone, the huge lit candles in the glass jars burning pointless against the daylight.
Christ, he said.
He said it like a question.
Our mother shook her head, nodded her head, nodded from one to the other of the two statues the hotel had on either side of the docking entrance, shook her head again then put her finger to her mouth as if to smooth the place beneath her nose, graceful, but really to quieten Leif and us.
They were life size, the statues, substantial white stone, shining. They looked churchy. They looked related but they were separate. One was of a sad looking beautiful woman with a cloth round her head exactly like a Virgin Mary with her arms cupped, open and empty, one hand upturned and her eyes downturned, closed or gazing down at her own empty lap, at nothing but the folds in her clothes. The other was of the bent body of a man. He was obviously meant to be dead, his head turned to one side, his arms and legs meant to look limp. But the angle he was at on the floor made him look stiff and awkward, sprawled but frozen.
Leif gave him a push and he rocked from side to side. Our mother looked panicked.
Rigor mortis, Leif said. So nowadays this is what passes for pity. And this is what happens to art when you think you can make a hotel of it.
Our mother told Leif in a formal sounding voice, as if she didn't know us, that she'd be in touch. She did a thing with her head to remind us about the cameras in the corners, she kissed us with her eyes, and then, like we were guests who'd been quite nice to her, she hugged each of us separately, polite, goodbye.
We traced our way back through the crowds of tourists to where we'd left the campervan by using a Google streetmap. It was easier to navigate by the shops than by the streets so we went towards Chanel instead, biggest thing on the map. Now Gucci. Now Nike. Strange when we finally found the far side where Alana's flat was, a place not even registering on Google as a place, that Leif got in on the driving side, because it was our mother who always drove. She was good at the campervan which was notoriously tricky. He was going to be less good, less sure of it, which is maybe why he made us both sit in the back even though the passenger seat was empty. Maybe this was to stop us fighting over who got to sit up front. Maybe he just didn't want to have us watching him too close while he was concentrating.
He turned the ignition. It started.
We'll give it a month then we'll come back and collect her, whether Alana's job's still on the line or not, he said as we left the city.
But it was a good thing. It was all in a good cause. Alana was our mother's sister. We had only met her once before, back when we were too small to know, and she'd been too ill for us to see much of her this time. But because of...
Excerpted from Gliff by Ali Smith. Copyright © 2025 by Ali Smith. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
A four-time finalist for the Man Booker Prize, Smith is perhaps best known for her seasonal quartet, a series of novels, each named for a season of the year, produced as a sort of experiment in writing on and about "the surface of now," as she has described it. Written and published on a radically accelerated schedule, each novel responds almost in real time to the crises of the day, from Brexit and the refugee crisis to Covid and climate change.
Gliff, Smith's thirteenth novel, is also a commentary on our contemporary political landscape, but it takes place in the future, describing a brutal surveillance state that is a chillingly plausible extrapolation from our current reality—an increasingly hostile world of growing intolerance and authoritarianism, social divisions and inequalities, data tracking and algorithmic control. If the novels of the seasonal quartet show us the "surface of now," Gliff shows what's just beyond—where we're headed and what's around the bend. Needless to say, it's not a place we want to go.
Set in the near future in an unspecified location that reads as Britain but could be a stand-in for anywhere in the Western world, Gliff tells the story of two siblings, the evocatively named Briar and Rose, who are forced to fend for themselves when their mother is called away to tend to a family emergency. At first, the details of their situation are sketchy, but the vibes are distinctly dystopian. As the novel opens, the children have gone to meet their mother outside the luxury hotel where she has begun working to cover for her ill sister. She signals uneasily with her eyes, puts her fingers to her lips to silence an inopportune comment. Surveillance cameras and microphones are everywhere.
Things take a menacing turn when the children return home with Leif, their mother's boyfriend, and find a bright red circle painted around their house (see Beyond the Book). It's the unmistakable sign that they have been marked as "unverifiables," an underclass of citizens who have been designated as undesirable and cast to the margins of society. When another painted red circle appears around their campervan and Leif disappears, Briar and Rose are forced to go into hiding on their own to avoid the customary fate of unverifiables—getting rounded up by the state machinery, sent to a reeducation center, and deployed to a brutal work camp.
In the totalitarian system in which Briar and Rose live, the grounds for being declared unverifiable are myriad, including ethnicity, religion, disability, or any other trait deemed objectionable or inconvenient. Most, we learn, have been unverified for transgressions of speech or thought—for example, "saying out loud that a war was a war when it wasn't permitted to call it a war," "writing online that the killing of many people by another people was a genocide," or "defaming the oil conglomerates by saying they were directly responsible for climate catastrophe."
Smith never explicitly says why Briar and Rose have been unverified, but readers are left to surmise that it has something to do with their idealistic mother's status as a whistleblower who exposed the toxic truth about the products of a powerful weedkiller company—or perhaps her general refusal to conform to social expectations. In this tech-mediated society, adults walk around with their eyes glued to their devices, and children no longer go to school. Instead, they wear "educators" on their wrists—special smart watches that also double as personal spying devices. The children's independent-minded mother, however, remains stubbornly old-school, refusing to get a smartphone and teaching her children to value obsolete things like books. "Our mother thought smartphones were liabilities," Briar says, "a device that means you see everything through it."
Narrated by Briar, a precocious teen who is the older of the two siblings, Gliff weaves in recollections from the past to fill in these details from the children's backstory. There are also repeated time jumps to a period five years in the future, when the siblings have been separated. Briar has recently been released from a reeducation center. Rose's fate and location are unknown. Having managed, against all odds, to become reverified, Briar now works as a supervisor in a sweatshop-style factory, enforcing the system's draconian rules against the unverifiables who toil there—until a chance encounter with a character from the past unleashes a flood of suppressed memories and provokes a daring act of resistance.
An ominous vision of a dystopian future of techno-totalitarianism, Gliff is a cautionary tale all too relevant for our current day—a time when surveillance technology is increasingly prevalent, algorithms control the information we see through our social media feeds, a handful of tech oligarchs have growing political sway, and democratic institutions are in decline worldwide.
The book deals with dark topics—oppression, inequality, prejudice—but it is also about individual resilience, human connection, and meaning. Those are heavy themes, but Smith writes with a light touch, lacing the narration with playful cultural references, humor, puns, double meanings, and whimsical flourishes. Indeed, elements of the book read like a fairy tale or fable. Navigating through a landscape of perils on their own, the two siblings evoke Hansel and Gretel—except that, instead of a wicked witch, they encounter a fairy godmother in the figure of Oona, a spunky, kindly old woman who resists the state's surveillance apparatus.
Gliff's title refers to the name Rose gives to a horse she befriends—an animal described in almost mythical terms, adding to the fable-like feel of the book. Later, stumbling across a dictionary in an old abandoned school library, Briar discovers that "gliff" is in fact a real word, a Scottish term with a long slew of meanings that take up a page and a half. One of the definitions, Briar is thrilled to learn, is "a substitute word for any word."
"You've actually called him something unpindownable," Briar reports excitedly to Rose. "You've given him a name that can stand in for, or represent, any other word, any word that exists. Or ever existed. Or will. Because of what you called him, he can be everything and anything." For Briar, this makes the horse a symbol of boundless possibility—and, in the end, an object lesson in meaning-making.
Like the algorithms and data that dictate what people are allowed to be and do in the repressive system depicted in the book, the definitions we attach to things are an attempt to pin them down, restrict what they can mean. Yet the horse remains untethered to human definitions, able to escape any meaning we impose on him. This is not only because of the name Rose gave him, something that effectively can mean everything and anything and so, in some sense, nothing. ("It's like you've both named him and let him be completely meaning-free!") More fundamentally, Briar comes to realize, it's because the horse doesn't need any name in the first place. What humans name him or indeed whether we name him at all has no bearing on the horse's reality—just as the horse's world is no less real because the horse himself has no words with which to describe it.
Fans of speculative fiction who like meticulous worldbuilding may find the future society described in Gliff to be underspecified—impressionistically rendered rather than fully articulated. The book also leaves some key plot elements unresolved, including what happens in the intervening years before the five-year jump to the future. No doubt many of these details will be spelled out in a companion novel Smith plans to release later in 2025 (reflecting her characteristic love of word play, the book is to be called Glyph). Other gaps in the narration are perhaps deliberate. After all, as Briar's ruminations suggest, one message of the book is that there is a kind of freedom in ambiguity, in what's left unsaid, in the undefined spaces that leave room for new meanings to open up.
Like all tyrannical regimes, the surveillance state in Gliff seeks the ultimate power to control the currency of meaning, to define who people are and what counts as reality, and to erase any space for individual meaning-making. To Rose, with the innocent ingenuity of a child, the solution is simple: "Bri, who is really good with machines and tech, is going to invent a technology that eats all the data that exists about people online so people can be free of being made to be what data says they are."
Reviewed by Elisabeth Herschbach
In Ali Smith's Gliff, two children living in a sinister surveillance state in the not-too-distant future return home to find a line of red paint circling their house. In this dystopian society where all-pervasive technology tracks and controls every aspect of people's lives, these red painted lines are used to flag those who have been judged to be socially unacceptable, marking them off from the rest of society.
On a symbolic level, these red painted circles are a brilliantly evocative image, calling to mind the red circles a teacher inks around mistakes or a proofreader's marks flagging text for deletion or correction. Inevitably, there are also echoes of the term "redlining"—discrimination through systematic exclusion—while the imagery of circles and red lines evokes both the notion of a boundary not to be crossed and the notion of being cast out of bounds. Crossing the line results in social exclusion, expressed in the most visible way—being branded in glaring red, the color of prohibition (think stop signs) or shame (think The Scarlet Letter).
As a literal plot device, the painted red circles in Gliff add an element of the absurd to the story. In the dystopian world of the book, these red circles function as a powerful form of social control. Faced with red paint, most of the characters freeze as if encountering an insurmountable barrier or scatter in panic as if confronting a lethal threat. Yet for all their ominous symbolism, the lines are comically easy to circumvent. The red paint around the children's house is laid over loose bits of rubble that can easily be scraped away. Rose, the younger sibling, simply walks over the line and strides into their house. In an added twist, the machine that paints these lines is absurdly low-tech for such a high-tech society—a crude, hand-pushed contraption similar to a lawnmower that looks like "an invention made by an amateur for a joke," as Smith describes it. "Why are those machines they're using so rubbish?" Briar, the elder sibling, comments, "Don't we rate being bullied by something more technologically impressive?"
Absurd, surreal, and illogical elements are common in dystopian fiction, used to convey a sense of disorientation and alienation, the unsettling experience of living under the senseless and arbitrary dictates of an oppressive system. In Gliff, the absurd incongruity of Smith's line-painting machine—"such a stupid looking apparatus," as Briar puts it—also works as a reminder of another feature of oppressive and authoritarian regimes: they exert power over us by extracting our complicity and compliance. A clunky machine you can easily knock over and a circle of paint you can simply sidestep are threatening only if you've accepted the dictates of the regime imposing these threats. Otherwise, they're just comical.
Reflecting on the relationship between power and resistance, Vaclav Havel, a one-time political dissident and later president of the Czech Republic, argued that in a totalitarian society, people's everyday acts of acquiescence and compliance reinforce a culture of obedience that enables and perpetuates the repressive power of the state. "Individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system," he wrote in his essay "The Power of the Powerless."
In Gliff, it is perhaps not a stretch to see this dynamic at work in the behavior of Briar and Rose's young neighbor, who accidentally ends up in a red circle of paint and remains frozen inside, terror-stricken, even as the horse next to him walks on, stepping over the red paint like it isn't even there. It is certainly evident in the response given by one man who is confronted while applying the red circles: just doing my job, he says.
Havel's concept of compliance is similar to what American historian Timothy Snyder has referred to as anticipatory obedience in explaining how governments with authoritarian tendencies can devolve into full-blown tyranny. "Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given," Snyder writes in his book On Tyranny. "A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do."
In the early stages, the demands may seem small and relatively inconsequential—perhaps, like the red painted circles in Gliff, nothing that looks like a serious threat. Yet by falling into line with its demands, people and institutions show the regime what it can get away with, enabling it to seize increasingly more extreme powers and to exercise ever-growing coercion. By then, of course, it is too late. The "first heedless acts of conformity" can no longer be reversed, as Snyder writes.
In Gliff, some but not all of the houses and buildings marked with red circles are later bulldozed by the state. Briar wonders what the point of it all is. "If they're not going to knock down all the places that they paint red round, why are they painting red round buildings at all?" Oona, an elderly activist Briar meets, gestures to the people passing by. Swerving in unison to avoid a section of red pavement, they flow away from the paint in a single mass, as if magnetized by an irresistible electric force. "I'd have said the point makes itself pretty clear," she answers. "See what a simple line, a visible mark of the utmost simplicity and cheapness, can do to a populace?"
Historians and policy experts warn that authoritarianism is on the rise in the United States and around the world. If so, Smith's grim vision of the future has clear lessons for today. So does Timothy Snyder: "Do not obey in advance."
Filed under Society and Politics
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