In her latest novel Gliff, acclaimed British author Ali Smith delivers a chilling and wistful tale that urgently speaks to our crisis-ridden times. With her signature cleverness and lyrical virtuosity, Smith extrapolates our current trajectory into a grim dystopia, where even the textures of the world are encrypted with the brutish ciphers of money and power.
At the heart of this haunting story are two lost children, Briar and Rose, who must navigate a landscape where truth has become obsolete and resistance seems futile. Separated from their mother, a corporate whistleblower turned outcast, the siblings find themselves among the “unverified”—those without status in the all-pervasive “system” that controls the very currency of meaning.
Decoding a Brutal World
From the very first pages, Smith immerses readers in her characters’ fanatical alertness as they try to decode their perilous surroundings. Squeezed through a gap in the ominous red line newly painted around their home, Briar and Rose venture out to make sense of a world where even Google Maps glows with the ciphers of capitalism:
Now Gucci. Now Nike.
– Ali Smith, Gliff
In Smith’s refinement of the Orwellian vision, no jackboots are required to enforce compliance—just the computer forever saying “no” to those whose devices won’t let them pass. As the children navigate this hostile terrain, negotiating with rule systems becomes a vital survival skill.
Semiotics for Survival
Key to their quest is an unlikely guide: semiotics, the study of signs and their meanings. In a crisis that has made truth-telling obsolete, unraveling the hidden codes that shape perception becomes a radical, essential act. And Smith, ever the impish subversive, delights in the revolutionary potential of even the most academic pursuits.
Himself named Leif—hinting, perhaps, at the trickster heritage of his Viking namesake—the children’s enigmatic protector embodies this faith in the power of signs. “Overdetermined,” he tells Briar, is “when something has to carry more than its fair share of meaning.” It’s a lesson Smith imparts with emblematic economy, layering her swift-moving tale with luminous tendrils of implication.
A Questing, Venturesome Brilliance
In the midst of an often pitiless narrative, Smith’s sheer questing brilliance becomes its own wellspring of hope. Like children themselves, her prose seems possessed of a radical plasticity, a born subversiveness that can never wholly be suppressed. And while money may monopolize meaning in this fallen world, it cannot touch the private language of memory and love that her characters weave from the loose threads of their fraying lives.
Gliff is to be followed next year by Glyph, a sister novel promising to further explore “how we make meanings and … are made meaningless.” It is typical of Smith’s roving intellect that a book so impishly playful should embrace matters of such deadly seriousness—not merely the future of the novel, but of meaning itself.
It helps in all of this that Smith’s natural mode of discourse, in the best way, resembles the questing and venturesome learning strategies of children.
– Paraic O’Donnell, The Guardian
In a literary landscape where formal audacity is often pursued as an end in itself, Smith remains a deeply humane innovator, forging her verbal fireworks in service of a moral vision as expansive as it is unsparing. Like the great European experimentalists who are her lodestars, she takes cleverness seriously—not as an escape from the urgencies of the present, but as our best hope for rising to meet them.
Gliff is a stark reminder that truth, like meaning, must be collectively defended if it is to survive. In a world on fire, Ali Smith entreats us, the crisis is now—and the signs, if only we can learn to read them, are everywhere.
