Ali Smith’s compelling vision of a not-too-distant future builds on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World but in doing so interrogates, and deftly dismantles, Huxley’s anthropocentric, male-centred perspective. Smith’s narrative’s rooted, if not in the now, in the almost-now, a world whose features closely resemble those of contemporary Britain. It’s primarily presented by Briar or Bri a trans/non-binary teenager looking back at events that totally changed their life. These events unfolded during Bri’s early teens when they lived with their mother, her partner Leif and younger sister Rose. A family emergency led first to their mother’s, and then Leif’s, departure abroad, leaving Bri and Rose in hiding. Like so many of Smith’s protagonists, Bri and Rose are outsiders. Here part of groupings labelled deviant or disruptive by their wider society. Everywhere they go, they’re literally marked out as other - specially-designed machines circling their homes with red paint. They’re known as the Unverified, non-persons who’ve evaded compulsory classificatory systems or those whose origins or actions are deemed aberrant: always in danger of being hunted down via the digital surveillance technologies central to their society’s elaborate control and containment mechanisms. As in Huxley, technology's a key concern.

But, unlike Huxley’s, the structure of Smith’s authoritarian society’s hazy, lacking specificity, gleaned only through its direct impact on individuals like Bri – perhaps because so much of Smith’s setting reconfigures aspects of our crisis-ridden present it’s relatively easy to fill in the blanks. The division between the haves and have-nots is recognisably stark. The wealthy live in a state of oblivion so marked they seem more like figures in a still-life than flesh-and-blood creatures: reliant on a vast underclass to service their needs. These lesser beings are expected to submit to their fate. Anyone who doesn’t can be forcibly dispatched to draconian, re-education facilities - not unlike Huxley’s conditioning centres – or simply disappeared. But the majority willingly submit, becoming complicit in monitoring and disciplining their fellows: often rendered more compliant through drugs in ways that mirror the opioid crisis. Bri and Rose are different, homeschooled by their mother, they’ve been brought up with books not screens, expected to be questioning, to value direct experience over digital substitutions.

Left to their own devices, Rose and Bri encounter a small herd of horses earmarked for the local abattoir, and Rose forms a bond with a grey she calls Gliff. Smith uses Gliff to explore possibilities for kinship and connection which allow for the acceptance of difference and unknowability; opening up questions of speciesism, relations between human and non-human. All of which gradually intersects with an exploration of issues around climate change, environmental blight, and the destructive power of global conglomerates. As in earlier works, Smith’s vigorously critiquing contemporary capitalism: its precarity and inhumane work practices; the dangerous sweatshops and gruelling production lines that feed its rampant consumerism. But she’s also interested in themes around transience, moments of monumental change not dissimilar to the move from the pre-industrial to industrial societies; the flow of history, directions taken, directions that might still be possible. Although Bri and Rose’s future appears bleak, there are glimpses of light, pockets of resistance in the form of organisations like The Campions. The faint chance that fluidity might overcome fixity and conformity.

In comparison to other Smith novels, Gliff’s less explicitly formally innovative. It’s a lot more accessible, less intricate, more linear, more direct. But it’s quintessentially Smith in its themes and preoccupations, with a renewed emphasis on storytelling as a force for change. Smith’s narrative's rife with her trademark wordplay, intertextuality, and multiplicity of influences. There are direct and indirect references taken from art and art history; and to the work of writers like Alan Garner, Max Frisch, and H. G. Wells. Fragmented episodes owe a debt to Orwell’s dystopian narrative as much as to Huxley’s. Imagery and symbolism from mythology, fairy lore and fairy tales surfaces throughout. Bri and Rose’s names stem from an ancient folk ballad but equally conjure “Little Briar Rose” – the Grimms’ telling of “Sleeping Beauty”; and the pre-Raphaelite “Briar Rose” cycle. Here Briar Rose’s unaccountably awake yet surrounded by sleepwalkers incapable of comprehending reality’s perils. Smith’s political analysis could be a tad obvious at times; and the digital versus analogue debates didn’t quite work for me – felt uncomfortably close to Luddite. But I found her central characters sympathetic and was increasingly bound up in their plight. This has a satisfying ending but not a conclusive one, there’s a second instalment to follow – I’m excited to find out where that will lead.

As always beautifully written.
Smith never disappoints.
A dystopian tale set in the not so far future. With two excellent young characters at the forefront of the story.
I can't say everything was crystal clear for me by the end, so pleased to see there's a second book.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the arc.

When everything feels eerily familiar but also extremely unfamiliar in what can only be described as baffling, that is Ali Smith’s writing. I went into this not realising that it was somewhat dystopian, which I think added to the surrealism. If you want to feel disoriented but lose yourself in what can only be described as literary art then read Gliff. Nevertheless, like with a lot of her work, I spend so much of the book trying to figure out what is actually going on and what is meaningful and meaningless (woah, that reflects some of this book’s themes!) that it can be a bit of a headache. Despite that, there is just something so unique and beautiful about everything she writes, including this!