Ali Smith's writing has always been centred around the playfulness of language, its elasticity and surprising meanings. There is the mischievous way it alternately creates connections and misunderstandings between humans. Only Ali would conceive of a pair of novels whose titles are similar sounding words and each word has multiple definitions. “Glyph” is the second after her previous novel “Gliff”. Though there are some thematic links and both revel in the inventive glory of story telling, one of the strongest links between these books is how two characters have read the novel “Gliff” and disagree about its quality. Of course, Ali's two novel can be read independent of one another and it'd give a new meaning if you read them in an order separate to when they were published - like in her brilliant previous novel “How to Be Both” where the two sections can be read in different orders to give surprisingly different experiences.
This new book is filled with puns, the struggles of family life and the challenges of living in the world today (some of which are unique and others feel like the same old story felt through human history.) Adult sisters Petra and Patricia have been estranged for many years, but they had a strong connection to each other in childhood. They survived through living with an abusive father and the grief of losing their mother by conjuring or inventing the story of a special ghost. Now a certain spectre has made its presence felt in the present. This gives them the chance to reunite alongside Patricia's teen daughter Bill (Billie) who questions everything in a way which often unsettles adults. This novel is right up to date as it's set in 2026 and references many contemporary issues from debates over AI, whether flying certain flags is patriotic and waving other flags is criminal and the UK protests outside of asylum hotels. But it also looks back at history with stories of those who were lost in previous wars. There are individuals who resisted following the pack or simply showed their humanity by helping a disabled animal in need. Their voices were silenced by being executed by their fellow troops or they were literally flattened and left in the road. So many of these stories don't make it into the dominant narrative of history. In this novel they rise as spectres whose restlessness and indomitable spirits speak to the creative power of individuals.
There's an insightful passage in this book uttered by Bill which feels so relevant to what we're grappling with now: “there's this huge mechanism and it's acting on everybody. It is such a simple mechanism it is actually stealthy brilliance. You just say something that's the truth is a lie. Or that something that's a lie is the truth. Then the matter of something being true or not stops being about truth or lies and becomes about choosing a side and it drops itself like a blanket over everything, a blanket the size of the sky – no, maybe more like a net, like a gigantic fishing net, or the kind they use to drop over people on game shows on TV, something quite difficult to get untangled from so you have to struggle against it just to get yourself to the place where truth is.” I'm sure anyone who has been watching the news lately or feeling despair about the tone of current discourse can relate!
I was drawn to the lively personalities at the centre of this novel, but also some peripheral characters such as Glyph's longing for his lost lover and the sister's kindly uncle who was ignored at their mother's funeral. It takes real skill to make characters live on in a reader's imagination though only a slight bit of their experience is presented in the narrative. Smith is also brilliant at showing how though there may be tensions between relatives each family creates its own lexicon where words such as “stanchion” or “rubble” will take on their own meanings through being frequently used in their conversations. Most of all this book is a testament to the power of storytelling and how everyone will take their own meaning from those stories which are reinvented in their retelling - springing up like ghosts to tease, delight and provoke people to question the story about the world those in power want us to believe.
