Ali Smith’s Glyph is the spouse novel to her previous novel, Gliff (2024). Gliff used to be set in a surreal near-future dystopia. Glyph, in the meantime, is ready within the reward. However like Smith’s previous Seasonal Quartet, it gives the reader an uncanny model of our international, haunted via ghostly voices from the previous.
The unconventional makes a speciality of two sisters, Petra and Patricia (aka Patch). The motion strikes between scenes from their youth within the Nineteen Nineties and their present-day estrangement.
Two likelihood circle of relatives anecdotes of wartime tragedy have a shaping affect on their imaginative lives. One is the tale of a primary international warfare soldier who abandoned the military, fleeing with a blinded horse he wanted to avoid wasting. We be told that he used to be ultimately court-martialled and finished.
The opposite is the curious account of the way a feminine agent, travelling beneath duvet thru France in the second one international warfare, found out a mysteriously flattened corpse at the highway.
When younger Patch turns into distressed via the destiny of the flattened guy, Petra pretends that she will keep in touch with him within the afterlife. Episodes from his existence are introduced in brilliant element, and the reader is invited to take a position that the ghost could also be genuine.
Smith teasingly attracts consideration to the other ranges of fact at paintings within the novel. The picture of a flattened corpse turns into a metaphor for different kinds of knocking down, together with that of characters in fiction. At one level the narrating voice, with obvious authorial detachment, refers to “the flat character / literary device called Patricia”.
It’s then published that Patricia herself is narrating this segment. And the ghost of the flattened guy – who might merely be Petra’s invention – recalls studying a ebook wherein books are described as “flattened flowers at best”.
The unconventional additionally asserts a formidable hyperlink between tales and ghosts: “Story, however. It is haunting. Everything tells it.”
Glyph v Gliff
Even though it may be learn as a standalone paintings, Glyph inevitably invitations the reader to discover its dating with Gliff (2024), including but an additional measurement to this multilayered novel.
Creator Ali Smith.
Interfoto/Alamy
In some ways Petra and Patch’s dating mirrors that between Gliff’s siblings, Briar and Rose. Each more youthful sisters proportion a passion for puns and sly malapropisms. And the soldier’s doomed break out with the pony turns out to echo the mysterious disappearance of Rose at the again of a horse she rescued from being slaughtered.
Smith provides an additional complication into the combo when it’s published that the unconventional Gliff exists on the planet of Glyph. A temporary dialogue of its deserves (and weaknesses) between Petra and Patch gives a funny mirrored image of real-world reader responses to Gliff: “A bit too dark for me. A bit too clever-clever, a bit too on the nose politically, for a novel.”
The presence of Gliff inside of Glyph additionally complicates the that means of one of the hyperlinks between the 2 novels. Petra is certain she is being haunted via the blind horse of circle of relatives legend. However Patch means that it is a fable sparked via studying Gliff. The duology bureaucracy a type of textual Möbius strip – a mind-bending twisted loop with only one aspect – most likely nodding again to the double strands of Smith’s 2014 novel Tips on how to be Each.
Along all this playful twistiness sits a passionate dedication to a extra simply society. Billie, Patch’s teenage daughter, is central to this part of the unconventional. She resembles younger Florence in Ali Smith’s previous novel Spring (2019). Each are charismatically exuberant Greta Thunberg-style campaigners for social justice.
The long run international of the sooner novel Gliff appeared horrifyingly absurd in its unfairness. Considered thru Smith’s bitterly satirical lens in Glyph, our personal reward international turns out little much less surreal in its destructiveness, its assaults on creativity, freedom and the surroundings, and its dependancy to warfare and violence.
Like every of Smith’s works, Glyph is multifaceted. She is similarly adroit at taking pictures the emotional nuances of circle of relatives existence, mapping out the bigger political panorama, or beguiling the reader with joyfully witty metafictional and linguistic video games.
Readers steadily really feel pulled in two instructions when studying her novels. There may be such a lot to pause on, such a lot of startling turns of word or clues to hidden mysteries. But there may be an impossible to resist compulsion to show the pages, to determine what occurs subsequent.
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