Never knowingly unknowing, Ali Smith pre-empts the most likely criticism of her latest novel, Glyph, when a character says: “I’m just not sure that books that are novels and fiction and so on should be so close to real life … or so politically blatant.”
Glyph, which follows sisters Petra and Patch as they reflect on childhood attempts to grapple with the finality of death following the loss of their mother, goes further than any of Smith’s recent work in robustly answering this charge. While the Seasonal Quartet playfully anatomised the social fracture of post-Brexit Britain, and immediate predecessor Gliff dealt with the violence of the securitised state, Glyph, in its explicit engagement with the Israeli government’s apartheid and genocide in Palestine, raises the ethical stakes decisively. To engage in a Smithian pun – this is Art in the Age of Mechanical Mass Destruction.
As with most Ali Smith novels, Glyph’s primary power comes from its commitment to excavating the sediments of language; its etymological resonance and inference. For example, the primary relationship of Petra and Patch is lightly drawn: playful, delicate and tender. But it was their names rather than their characterisation that lingered with me long after reading. Petra, from the Greek for stone, with its echoes of scale, solidity, authority; contrasting with Patch, meaning to repair, with its echoes of care, survival, persistence. In a novel so actively engaged with one of the “longest and deadliest military occupations in modern history”, their names provide a perpetual and deeply affecting drumbeat, stark and dissonant.
Similarly, two of the central images of the novel draw their potency directly from the everyday horror of expansionist slaughter. The two sisters hear a story from the second world war, about a young soldier flattened by a tank whose body is left to rot in the road. Later they begin to half-seriously communicate with his ghost, calling him Glyph. On the one hand, Smith is playing with the question of what makes a character “flat” versus what makes one three-dimensional. On the other, especially when many readers will have images and reports of similar deaths in Palestine so firmly in mind, Smith is raising ethically substantive questions about representations of the dead, about who gets to speak and who is decisively silenced. When Patch’s teenage daughter watches a distressing video of a horse trapped under tons of rubble, she notes that it was “probably Gaza”; as readers, we are left in little doubt.
Nor are we in any doubt when we encounter exasperated, despairing descriptions of the thousands of people killed in Gaza while seeking “aid”: “did you hear about the people queueing for food and the snipers shooting at them and how the snipers doing this aren’t just shooting at people randomly, they are also playing a kind of shooting game? So some days they shoot people in the hands, some days the heads?”
That quote continues on, listing various other body parts; an incredulous, horrified, breathless tumble of words. Smith’s tonal skill as a writer is also used to great effect when dealing with the bureaucratic, authoritarian absurdity of the British state. Patch’s daughter, presumably keen that the government do something other than write a strongly worded cheque in response to Israeli war crimes, is arrested for waving a scarf “aggressively”. Her mother is later informed that “scarf waving is not in itself a specific criminal offence unless the waving of a particular scarf relates to a proscribed organisation … it was thought that the scarf waved like a flag by your daughter could have been said to be in tacit support of a newly proscribed organisation and officers at the scene must now consider any gesture toward this new proscription in this light”.
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. There is also something about Smith’s relentless focus on language that makes her particularly well suited to the task. As Orwell reminded us: “political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. Smith’s sensibility is fine-tuned to grapple with the avalanche of passive-voice headlines, asymmetric categorisations, outright linguistic inversions and semantic absurdities that have accompanied the increasingly desperate attempts to justify the unjustifiable.
Glyph is described as “family” to its predecessor, Gliff, connected mainly by a mood and a homophone. It is typical of Smith that from the title onwards, we are drawn in by a playful flourish, a pun, only to have the heart of the matter revealed to us once we engage fully with the language itself. Gliff, a vernacular Scottish word meaning to glimpse briefly, or to be startled suddenly, sits alongside Glyph, which means to carve, mark or engrave. From the outset, then, we are in no doubt: we have moved from the fleeting to the permanent, from the passing image to the inscribed and the indelible. We have moved from observers to witnesses. No matter the darkness, we can never say we did not see.
• Glyph by Ali Smith is published by Hamish Hamilton (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
