This dystopian tale feels scarily akin to the world we already live in

FICTION
Glyph
Ali Smith
Penguin, $39.99

Jeanette Winterson once wrote that the reason she so admires the work of her contemporary Ali Smith is “because she breaks the rules so gleefully, she engages in wonderful wordplay and cares deeply for the message and the meaning”. Reading Smith’s 15th novel, Glyph, it is impossible not to be struck by the Scottish author’s mastery of all of those elements: her clever wordplay, her unapologetically metafictional storytelling and her obvious dedication to the message and the meaning of what it is that she writes.

Glyph is an unlikely companion piece to Gliff  (2024), a dark near-future dystopian work in which the British population live in a country where the state paints red lines around the houses of those refusing total state digital surveillance and sets children to work in underground basements, dismantling old electronics and stripping them of their precious metal content. Although obviously meant to depict the near-future, reading it felt eerily prescient – and deeply disturbing.

The world depicted in Glyph, feels much more akin to that we inhabit currently. The body of a female journalist is eventually returned to her family mutilated, just like that of Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna. A clever teenager, in trouble at a school where female teachers are subject to constant misogynist abuse from boys, is arrested for standing on the footpath, chatting, while holding the “wrong kind of flag”. A woman who used to have a job rewriting AI-generated text to make it sound more human is made redundant, as AI masters the skill of sounding more human than humans themselves.

Glyph unmistakably takes place in modern Britain, whereas the setting of Gliff was intentionally much more speculative. The characters within Glyph’s fictional tableau have, in fact, often read Gliff, borrowing phrases from actual, published reviews of the book to express their disappointment in the experience. Drawing from motifs unique to classic children’s literature, Gliff has at its core siblings who were abandoned by their carers, left to survive alone in an increasingly isolated and dangerous world, awaiting the return of the grown-ups who would care for them. Conversely, the estranged adult sisters at the heart of Glyph have watched their mother die as their cold, tyrannical father stands idly by.

Petra Wild, the sister who narrates the first half, wasn’t impressed with Gliff, noting that, “It was okay. It was quite good. I thought it was well-written and everything but it was a bit too clever for me. And what’s with all that horse stuff?” The “horse stuff” to which Petra refers is central to both novels. Smith again draws this element of her storytelling narrative structure from children’s literature, invoking the motif of the relationship between a boy and his horse, represented here as the tale of a young soldier in the trenches of World War I, caring for a pit pony brought up from the darkness below ground to transport military supplies instead of coal.

The horse is blinded during a gas attack, its “eyes turned to egg white”, and the young soldier, knowing the horse will be considered useless and shot, removes both his own and the horse’s military kit and walks off into the woods. A few months later he is caught and made an example of “by roping him to a post early one morning, blindfolding him and having a firing squad shoot them dead”. His fate is suspended in time, a ghostly spectre that echoes down later in the novel when, in the aftermath of the World War II, a motorcyclist transporting military dispatches in France comes across the body of a man completely flattened to the road, as if a tank has run over him.

The sisters of Glyph – Petra and Patch, later known as Patricia – hear both stories in childhood and remain understandably haunted by them into adulthood. The scenes of horror from the First and Second World Wars are juxtaposed with scenes from Gaza, and Patricia’s daughter, Bill, is arrested for “waving an inflammatory scarf” at a protest, deemed by police to have been “in tacit support of a newly proscribed situation”.

Glyph moves effortlessly back and forth between the past and the present, cleverly playing with E.M. Forster’s observations about “flat” and “round” characters in fiction whilst eschewing traditional, realist storytelling conventions to weave a story that ultimately remains open-ended and entirely unresolved.

Smith’s metafiction converges and divides, rises and falls, all with a gleeful knowingness and arch humour. It is, in the end, a quite remarkable and utterly unique novel from one of the finest writers working today.

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