In her feisty, graceful Glyph, Ali Smith mulls writing and language among other themes: it’s her best work since the lauded Seasonal Trilogy. Written language shape-shifts, from glyphs and runes to schematic sonnets to today’s emojis and texts; Smith’s experimentation links this notion with the political upheavals and moral betrayals of our moment. No Anglophone author channels molten rage with her level of skill ... Brims with whimsy, but it’s more than a game ... I won’t spoil the conclusion except to note the final three pages alone are worth the price of a hardcover. Once again Smith makes her case beautifully: art points the way forward, enduring across millennia, like those Sumerian tablets, yet transforming itself and us each day.
It’s hard to summarise the story because there are so many disparate elements that flower from nowhere, with few handholds the reader can grab onto ... Lighter and subtler than Gliff ... Sometimes a little crazy is just what the world needs.
Glyph’s primary power comes from its commitment to excavating the sediments of language; its etymological resonance and inference ... It is a bold move to be so morally unflinching, especially in the face of a perceived aesthetic orthodoxy that so often privileges distance and irony, but in Glyph we see a major British writer answering the call of the day when so many others have equivocated or turned away.
It is impossible not to be struck by the Scottish author’s mastery of all of those elements: her clever wordplay, her unapologetically metafictional storytelling and her obvious dedication to the message and the meaning of what it is that she writes ... Smith’s metafiction converges and divides, rises and falls, all with a gleeful knowingness and arch humour. It is, in the end, a quite remarkable and utterly unique novel from one of the finest writers working today.
Most readers will share Smith’s views on the climate crisis, war, genocide and surveillance, and by now we certainly know hers, so this material can feel predictable. But Smith remains an exceptionally gifted storyteller, able to do in two pages what other novelists cannot manage in ten ... Smith’s capacity for hope is infectious, and the hope posited by these books is that storytelling can restore not just our humanity but our political responsibility and agency.
I reviewed Gliff when it came out and thought it fell flat: it seemed to fail to sketch its dystopian world in detail and to rely on the obfuscation of dreamlike sequences. Now I wonder if I was too harsh, as it was at least far better than Smith’s current offering. It actually attempted a plot and tried to provide interest for its readers. Glyph does neither of these things ... If there is any message it seems to be about paying attention; about noticing the world’s horrors around us and using fiction to hold the moment to account. It’s a worthwhile aim for literature. But I can’t help thinking that Ali Smith is no longer the person to write it.
The relationship between Gliff and Glyph is more synergetic than symbiotic – they have no characters or plot points in common, and where the action of Gliff took place in the very near future ... There’s no resolution to any of this. Various questions raised by the narrative – why exactly did Petra and Patch stop speaking to one another? Who actually was Glyph? – are never answered. The novel has an improvisational, open-ended feel, which is only appropriate.
