Ali Smith’s new publishing project takes a step into the near future, and it’s a future of banal oppression. Young siblings Briar (our narrator) and Rose return home with Leif, their mother’s boyfriend, to find a red line painted around their house. Leif takes them away in the campervan to a supermarket car park—only for a red line to appear there in the morning, and the van to be towed away.

The meaning of these lines is oppressive: you don’t belong here, you are outside of society, you are “unverifiable.” Their origin is banal: a top-heavy contraption called a supera bounder, pushed around by a man in overalls, not much different from someone marking lines on a sports field. But Briar recognizes the sinister implications of this machine: “Had someone, whoever they were, in the middle of the night, pushed such a stupid looking apparatus that close to us all in the campervan, us asleep?” (p. 57)

There are many reasons why someone might be declared unverifiable in Smith’s near future. Eventually, these will prove to include bluntly discriminatory characteristics such as disability and ethnicity, but to begin with, the reasons may seem more nebulous. Briar describes a few from the group of unverifiables that they and Rose fall in with:

One person here had been unverified for saying out loud that a war was a war when it wasn’t permitted to call it a war. Another had found herself declared unverifiable for writing online that the killing of many people by another people was a genocide. Another had been unverified for defaming the oil conglomerates by saying they were directly responsible for climate catastrophe. Another had been unverified for speaking at a protest about people’s right to protest. (pp. 161-2)

There is a level of abstraction to these reasons—as Briar observes, they have to do with words. Briar has an appreciation of words for their own sake, which comes from the way they and Rose gained their learning. This is a data-hungry society with little tolerance for those outside its approved parameters (non-binary Briar being just one example). Most children have an “educator” device placed on their wrist, but the siblings’ mother wanted them to take their education from a broader palette—which may well be what made them unverifiable.

Rose’s and Briar’s mother is skeptical of new technology—she refused to let her children have smartphones, for example—which leads to some debate within Gliff on this subject. For instance, the younger Briar tries to argue for the benefits of AI:

AI is a fantastic thing that has even made it possible for us to read the scrolls that were burnt closed and before would just fall apart if you tried to open them into nothing but ashes in that volcano place called Herculaneum … (p. 40)

Briar’s mother replies:

If only people paid more attention … to what history tells us rather than all this endless congratulating ourselves for finding a new way to read it. (pp. 40-1)

This doesn’t resolve into a wholesale rejection of technology, either in that particular conversation or in the novel as a whole—even the siblings’ mother must concede that libraries tend to be electronic these days. But the attitude she instills makes Briar someone whose face lights up at the sight of a roomful of books, someone who enjoys browsing the dictionary for new meaning.

Their education has also given Rose and Briar a sensitivity to the conceptual. They are able to intuit that what happens to them is not the only thing that matters, but also how they think and feel about it: “why do they want us to feel so temporary?” asks Briar (p. 64). So they understand that resistance has to take place partly at a conceptual level, and the symbol of this is a horse that they buy with money from Leif (though they question if a horse can ever truly be owned). The horse represents possibility unbounded by human words:

Was a horse more lost to the world, because of no words, or was the horse more found—or even founded—in the world because of no words? (p. 162)

Rose names the horse Gliff, and here Smith’s novel gains its title. “Gliff” is a Scottish dialect word meaning a fright, a glimpse, or a moment in time. Briar looks it up in a dictionary, and one meaning in particular jumps out: “a substitute word for any word.” Briar sees this as a sign that Gliff the horse can escape any meaning that humans may try to impose on him. As Briar says to Rose:

Because of what you called him, he can be everything and anything. And at the same time his name can mean nothing at all. It’s like you’ve both named him and let him be completely meaning-free! (p. 183)

Rose and Briar, however, can’t escape the authorities forever. There’s a scene where they are set upon by men with supera bounders which really distils the novel’s mixture of threat and absurdity: The image of an attempt to subdue Gliff by covering his hooves in red paint is silly—but the menace of the attempt still comes through. The combination of elements doesn’t always come off so well: The more abstract concerns of Smith’s book are well articulated, but the physical aspects of this future don’t have the same heft. It’s a future that feels more sketched-in than lived in.

I say this with the caveat that Gliff is only half of Smith’s project. A companion novel, Glyph, will follow next year, and (according to publicity) will “tell a story hidden in the first novel.” I can only speculate about that, but there is a five-year jump in Gliff, with the full fates of the siblings yet to be revealed. Rose escapes with the horse, beyond the bounds of the present novel. For the rest of the novel, her unresolved story gives hope to Briar, who isn’t so lucky.

Five years on, Briar has been processed by the authorities and works as a supervisor in a factory where children are put to work, and injuries are ignored:

processing and re-ed made me who I am today. In just five years it’s taken me places I’d never have imagined possible:
the Delivery Level building where the lights never go out;
the Packing Belt. It’s an apparatus that almost never stops;
the door to the office currently assigned to me … (p. 221)

The twist here on the language of ambition reveals how Briar’s ideals have been pared away. It takes an encounter with someone who knew Rose for Briar to start recalling how they used to be, and to start chipping away at the system from the inside. What we don’t really get is Briar’s experience of becoming, and living as, part of the system, which makes the novel feel less rich than it might.

At heart, Gliff is a tale of young people discovering the means to resist oppression, and there are striking moments of breakthrough. From an SF reader’s point of view, though, it is missing a few of the imaginative pieces that would truly make it sing. Anyway: Roll on Glyph, and let’s see what Smith has kept hidden from us.