Gliff

(by Ali Smith)

I will read anything by Ali Smith but dystopias are generally not my thing, and reading about a near-future dystopia feels especially rough right now. But there’s a horse in it (the horse is the title character, in fact) and in the end I think there were more things I liked about this book than not, though it took me a while to get into it. (But after that slow start, I raced through the final section.)

At the start we meet our narrator, Bri, and Bri’s sister, Rose; they’re saying goodbye to their mom for a bit and heading home with their mom’s boyfriend, Leif. But there’s a red line painted around their house when they get back to it, and Leif says it’s time for them to go. They set off in their campervan, but a red line gets painted around that, too, when they stop for the night. Leif takes the kids to another town by train, buys them some canned food and a can opener, and leaves them with the food and some cash at the empty house of someone he knows—saying it’s just for a short time, while he goes back to fetch their mom from where she’s been working, where they said goodbye to her. But will he come back? And what’s up with those red lines anyway?

As the book proceeds we learn a bit more about the society in which Bri and Rose live, where there’s “disastrous heat” and heavy surveillance; where “unverifiables” (marked out by those red lines) are sent to “Adult Retraining Centres” or “Child Retraining Centres,” where you might be deemed to be unverifiable “because of words,” because of calling something a war “when it wasn’t permitted to call it a war,” or because of “writing online that the killing of many people by another people was a genocide,” or because you were “defaming the oil conglomerates by saying they were directly responsible for climate catastrophe,” or “for speaking at a protest about people’s right to protest.” We learn that there is a resistance movement but we don’t learn too much about it; it becomes clear that this book is set in a future England but it is less clear what is happening in the rest of the world, or how exactly things ended up this way in England.

But the story is less about the whole world and more about Bri and Rose and Gliff (who enters the siblings’ lives after Rose sees him in a field behind the house where Leif has left them). Gliff is maybe my favorite thing about this story, Gliff as horse and word (there’s a long passage about the meanings of the word gliff (which Bri looks up in a dictionary for Rose)) and symbol: Gliff stepping away from one particular grim future (the abbatoir, in fact) and into the unknown. “We’re the future. It is this simple,” Rose says to Bri at one point. And then, later: “We’ll be making it up as we go,” Rose says.