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.
Much of the novel is dialogical, arranged in exchanges between two people ... Smith’s tonal acuity places us in the room with her characters, and this shot/reverse shot intimacy and immediacy are the novel’s power ... Glyph isn’t subtle, and it lacks the artistic coherence of Smith’s best work. But there’s no faulting its sincerity. It’s a didactic novel that argues for didacticism in our approach to a violently asymmetric world, that exposes our ironic distance (literary or otherwise) from current events for what it is: gutless and craven.
Thought-provoking, although somewhat less beguiling than her usual fare ... At the heart of Glyph are two sisters wrestling with the death of their young mum and the horrors of war, including the current situation in Gaza ... Ali Smith — bless her — refuses to shy away from current events and concerns, however sensitive.
Ali Smith follows her 2024 novel, Gliff with a loosely connected sequel ... Her writing, always full of jokes and wordplay, is inquisitive, improvisatory and a bit maudlin. Glyph feels thrown together as a story, but it provides companionship if not coherence—a burst of innocence amid the grim churn of the news.
Minimal ... As her titles suggest, Smith likes puns, riffs, and paradoxes. So do all her major characters, which is very convenient for her—though it can be grating for readers, if just about tolerable ... It seems that in Glyph, as in Gliff, the writer has been somewhat constrained, either by herself or by her publishers, so that any potentially tricky literary developments have been monitored closely. The simplicity of the language and the overexplanation of the story theme contribute to a suspicion that some limit has been placed on the difficulty of the work ... One is finally left to ask what Glyph is actually trying to do, and what it achieves.
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.
A funny, metafictional morality tale ... The setting is lightly sketched; this isn’t a fully realist novel, as Patricia acknowledges in calling herself a 'flat character' (all puns very much intended) ... Although Glyph provides plenty of literary pleasures, there is nonetheless reason to find in Smith’s writing a (not unjustifiable) deep and deeply puritan distrust of pleasure as we live through the worst kind of interesting times.
One of the great but increasingly dull preoccupations of contemporary fiction is a solipsistic obsession with its own self-importance and the 'power' of storytelling, and Glyph is no exception. Thankfully, Smith’s rich back catalogue of profoundly metafictional work has earned her something of a free pass to parse the complicated ethics of her practice, even if no glaringly original insights emerge here ... Where Glyph does excel is in Smith’s portrait of the relationship between the sisters, especially during their childhood. These scenes showcase her brilliant, inventive writing at its best, and I could have read pages more of the stuff. She writes their bond with the perfect amount of care, playfulness and love.
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.
