The power of family and words only hope for human race

There’s a moment in Gliff where its narrator, a child named Briar, reflects upon reading a dictionary that ‘there was such a thing as a family of words… all touching on each other, hitting or striking each other, acting on each other, influencing each other, agreeing with each other or throwing each other out, disturbing each other, doing all of these things at once.’ In Ali Smith’s latest novel, the power of language and the power of family are the only hope for the survival of the human race in a bleak, data-driven technocratic dystopia. And like everything Smith writes, it’s brilliant – in both senses of the word.

The setting is a near-future Britain where society is ruthlessly divided into ‘immortals’, whose lives and identities are meticulously verified by the state through the accumulation and manipulation of data, and ‘unverifiables’, whose thoughts and words and actions evade easy capture and categorisation. Among these unverifiables are Briar and her little sister, Rose, who find an ominous and initially inexplicable red line painted around their house and have to flee immediately. This premise, especially in conjunction with the heavily-pregnant naming, could easily tilt into clunky allegory, but Smith is too deft for that. The dystopia hums ominously in the background, cold and metallic, while at the forefront lies the bond between Briar and Rose – intimate, bruised and fiercely human.

Hiding in an abandoned house, the children find a distraction and sense of hope in a field full of horses beyond the house’s back fence. Rose names her favourite Gliff, but the eponymous Gliff is not only a horse, but a concept: a fleeting moment, a glimpse of something beyond the rigid structures of their world. The word itself has so many meanings that reading its etymology and definitions becomes dizzying. Gliff’s presence gives Briar and Rose a shared focus, a wildness untamable by state control that wishes to categorise and contain. This idea of language’s simultaneity rather than its limitation, and the power that lies within the ability to make utterances that are narrow enough to be understood yet broad and rippling enough to allow for questioning and interpretation and uncertainty is the rallying cry of her novel. That language has the power to defy the deity that is data, and that two children can instinctively and joyfully find linguistic play in the heat of a battle for survival is Smith’s argument for thought and play as an antidote to the repression and simplification and hate that surrounds us.

This is a book that is joyful as art and harrowing as reflection. A masterful piece of literature and a thought-provoking yet never sanctimonious piece of social commentary. It needs to be read, now.