Review | Ali Smith pairs imagination with urgency in her politically charged new novel, Glyph

Among contemporary novelists, Ali Smith stands out for her engagement with the political moment, as well as with her fondness for wordplay and what it reveals about the language we use. Her Seasonal Quartet (2016-20), for example, responded to post-Brexit Britain and is shot through with themes of resilience and renewal. More recently, Gliff (2024) was set in a near future of high-tech surveillance and linked the precarious state of the natural world with that of language itself.

Smith’s new novel, Glyph, can be read as a companion piece to Gliff. The earlier novel takes its name from the Scots word for a passing glimpse or a fright, whereas this volume focuses on a ‘glyph’ as a mark or sign, linked to a hieroglyph. The two books are connected symbolically, with resonances in the form of recurring motifs and stories within stories.

As with much of Smith’s work, plot is hardly the point with Glyph. Instead, patterns of connection, the play of speech, and reflections on how we live take centre stage. At one point, for instance, a character confesses: “Like everybody else now I’m a person who can cope with several screens.” Later, in the kitchen, she “grated the extra cheese into a bowl and watched it come apart from its block with something like a heightened understanding of what it might mean to be both whole and shredded”.

Surreal and the real

The story, such as it is, is narrated non-chronologically and revolves around episodes in the lives of two sisters, Petra and Patricia, both of whom grapple with the impact of their mother’s untimely death as well as their overactive imaginations. When they were children, they were haunted by the harrowing story of a soldier who was flattened by a tank, leading them to invent his ghost, named Glyph. Years later, Petra finds her bedroom trashed and believes she is being haunted by a spectral horse related to a family legend about a World War I deserter who tried to save a blind charger.

Glyph engages directly with the wreckage of war, be it in Gallipoli or Gaza, with characters being flattened both literally and symbolically. As it progresses, it touches upon a surveillance state that bristles at protest, with one character facing arrest for a minor act of resistance. The narrative also comments on the flattening impact of AI: we’re told that Patricia was employed as a spotter of AI text, rewriting it to make it sound more human. However, she’s replaced by an AI assistant, “because artificial intelligence is now thought to be better than any human not just at spotting artificial intelligence in advertising copy but also at rewriting it to make it sound more human”.

In this way, Smith keeps the proceedings light and nimble. There are frequent puns and playfulness, pointing out that language can represent reality but also distort it. The surreal is mixed with the real, and characters discuss other stories and books, including — nod, wink — the earlier Gliff. Such game-playing continues throughout: at one stage, a feeling of absence is referred to as a “prosthetic limbo”. If you groan at that, this book may not be for you.

Fiction and memory

For Smith, the antidote to a “flattened” world, whether by tanks or by technology, is the enduring, regenerative power of narrative. She reminds us that a story is a force “old as the hills itself and as brand new as everything that manages, against the odds, to grow fresh and new on those old hills”. Within these layers of fiction and memory, her characters find the resilience to remain whole even in a culture that would prefer them shredded.

In this sense, Glyph acts as a counterweight to what Frederic Jameson termed the “depthlessness” of modern life. It indicates that a heightened imagination is not an escape from reality, but an essential tool for truly engaging with it, accompanied by a radical form of care. 

Pay attention to the history you are making in the present, Smith suggests, or it will return to haunt you.

The reviewer is based in Mumbai.

Glyph

Ali Smith

Hamish Hamilton

₹899