Isn’t quite as ablaze with formal daring as...defiantly unclassifiable books. For all its chronological fracturing and stylistic play, it follows many of the familiar tropes and beats of dystopian Y.A. fiction ... Smith’s prose, as ever, is the principal enchantment: profane, playful, perpetually alert to the pleasures and serendipity of words.
A tricksy masterwork that straddles formal lines while reimagining Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel ... Gliff’s language is sparer than in her famous Quartet, yet she’s still throwing everything — art, literature, social justice, tart humor — against atrocities that damage our moral compasses and cripple our lives ... Can art and language shield us from our worst instincts? Smith wrestles with this question, veering from swaggering confidence to quiet resignation as she snaps the pieces of her puzzle into place.
Enriched by references to literature, art, and history, including Edgar Allan Poe, British painter George Stubbs, and the caves at Creswell Crags, which were first occupied by humans tens of thousands of years ago ... Hopefully Gliff will remain a cautionary tale and not be revealed as a glimpse into a crystal ball.
Vibrates with citation and allusion, other stories of sudden or slow apocalypse sprouting like weeds among the ruins ... Wittily and movingly accessible. Gliff is another tale about a Britain (and not only Britain) bound for environmental ruin, techno-despotism, and a jargon of atrocity—but it’s also filled, like its narrator and their sister, with invention and revolt.
The linguistic wildness of Ms. Smith’s writing, always a joyful signature of her books, contrasts effectively with the state’s urge to restrict speech and silo the population into fixed and exclusionary categories. But elsewhere the novel’s spirit of childlike wonder shades into the sort of didacticism customary to children’s books ... Perhaps Gliff is merely being faithful to its black-and-white outlook. But Ms. Smith’s great strength is her grasp of the strangeness and multiplicity of language. It seems wasteful to display those virtues in a story whose meanings are all so plain.
A deceptively lean and impeccably crafted story ... The novel is haunting and humorous, full of wit, wordplay, and references that run the gamut from eighteenth-century art to IBM. Smith’s genre-expansive work doesn’t stop at simply exploring identity and conformity under late-stage capitalism within its plot ... Calls us to engage critically with both the tyranny of language and the ways in which language allows us to redefine the world and ourselves. Like every story of resistance, it unfurls from a single word.
Set in a fever dream of a dystopian near-future ... While this absurdly timely novel has mostly bad things to say about the state of the world, it encourages the reader to push back the despair and rise to meet a future that feels all too close.
The reader is left – quite deliberately, I think – to fill in the blanks ... If Smith’s recent books were a handbook for 21st-century life, Gliff is a warning as to what will happen if we ignore their lessons.
Part allegory, part dystopian fiction and an altogether thrilling read, Gliff offers a scarily prescient look at a near-future where the next generation is tasked at solving, and surviving, the sins of now ... Smith’s command over the story, her ease with the dystopian genre, allows her to play with form throughout the book ... Throughout, the depressing subject matter is lightened by Smith’s humour and whimsy, her ingenuity on the page.
Can't seem to define itself ... Some of Smith’s ways of signalling her dystopian future read like details in a young-adult sci-fi novel ... Other problems are more serious ... The book’s emotional pull – a redemption story, of sorts – is never fully realised.
Not really a dystopian vision of the future, it is a clear-sighted lens on the present. There is a great deal of seriousness in this book, but its moments of humour, excitement and friendship are no less luminous for it. In fact, the dual existence of oppression and wonder is what makes each of those realities most real. This is a true novel of resistance – one that resets the creep of normalisation, and reminds us of the beauty that can exist in the world.
Few writers are as good as Smith at reminding us that novels are constructed, brick by brick, from individual word ... The language is so rich and dazzling that it’s all the more glaring when Gliff’s ideas aren’t. What its story offers is a simple binary of good and bad. As always Smith excels at portraying a young, innocent mind, but the authorities Briar is up against are cookie-cutter authoritarians ... Will be welcomed by Smith’s admirers and will leave agnostics unpersuaded.
Unsettling ... Peculiar ... Smith is nodding to Kafka while squandering the power of Kafkaesque uncertainty ... Leaves plenty of room for interpolation; the risk for its author is in her tendency to fill in the gaps.
It’s the possibility of multiple meanings that is freeing; more than that, the impossibility of a single meaning in any sufficiently free society. I think that, above all, is what Ali Smith wants us to pay attention to here, and it’s a very Ali Smith way of reaching a very science-fictional conclusion.
This is a book huge in scope, its frame of reference enormous ... A book that forces you to be comfortable with ambiguity. It will be partnered next year by Glyph, a companion novel which promises to reveal a story hidden in this one. It will be a joy to puzzle it out.
An evocative story of siblings in peril and a glimpse at where some of the trends roiling our world may be taking us ... The feeling one experiences reading Gliff is similar to that evoked when standing before an abstract impressionist work of art. Smith’s novel is less about creating fully fleshed-out characters or a meticulously structured plot than it is about summoning up a mood.
