Ali Smith: Gliff

With Ali Smith you are well aware you are likely to get tales of broken Britain and a grim picture of the present and, in the case of this book, the future. How far in the future is not clear but AI seems to be a familiar concept. We follow a small family of the struggling poor. The focus is on two of them. Initially we do not know their names and while the narrator refers to their sister, the narrator, who, we eventually learn has the unisex name of Bri, is seemingly of indeterminate sex. Later in the book when Bri is asked if he is a boy or girl,he replies Yes. Still later, when he is an adult,he is several times identified with the male pronoun so I am going with that.We learn that Bri is short for Briar and, his sister is called Rose and their names come from the old English folk song Barbara Allen.

They have a mother who works in a lowly post seemingly in the food industry though she previously had a good job in a pesticide company but when she questioned the safety of the product, she was fired. Early on in the book she has to leave as her sister is ill. They are left with Leif who is clearly older – he drives – but it is not clear why he is connected to them. We know they have a house but the day after the mother’s departure, someone has painted a thin red band right around the house. Again we do not know what this means but it is clearly bad and they have to leave in their camper van. Apparently they are used to sleeping in it. They decide to park in a Tesco car park but when they wake up, someone has painted a red band round the van. Moreover it will not start .Leif calls a tow truck and says he will find them a house which he does. There seem to be abandoned houses here and there. He is off to look for their mother.He leaves them food and money and assures them he will be back before both run out. Bri makes a list of what they might need including a way of making money and a non-smart phone they could get from their old house. Their mother was opposed to smart phones, saying they prevented them from getting a proper education.

They more or less manage on their own, helped by the fact that the house has electricity and running water. Bri wants to g back to their home and collect some things but it is too expensive. In their travels Bri sees a building being red-banded and an elderly woman resisting. Bri helps sabotage the activity and becomes friends with the woman who is called Oona.

Next to the house where they are staying is a field with six horses and Rose befriends one of the horses she christens Gliff. The farmer’s son, called Colon though they change it to Colin is a geek and has an educator which is like an I-watch but as he is a Designated Data Collector/Strangers he goes around asking people intrusive and personal questions and the Educator collects this data and is clearly very much part of the surveillance society. However he is taken with Rose and even lets them buy Gliff who, for a while, lives in the house! Colon’s Educator has identified Bri and Rose as UVs, i.e.Unverifiables, the name used for Undesirables who can be the poor, Travellers or anyone opposed to the corporate society and its control and surveillance.

Of course there is an opposition and it is in an abandoned school just near where Bri and Rose live. They soon discover it and soon move in with the others, including Oona and, as it was a school, there are a lot of books for Bri to enjoy. But we know this is not going too last. As we have already seen, Bri, now fully identified as male, keeps gooing but is not going to give up the fight.

Smith makes her point very well about the surveillance society, the exploitation of the poor, the corporatisation of the UK and how any opposition is ruthlessly crushed. We see this later in the novel when we get an image of the posh rich visiting a factory where the workers are more or less slave labour and are easily injured but clearly have to still keep on working. As a novel I felt it was less successful than some of her earlier ones as it is patchy, much is not explained and it is not always clear what social and technological advances have and have not taken place. The work we see in the factory, for example, would surely have been automated. However her point is not to provide a generic description of what a future Britain might be but to damn the trends – corporatisation, exclusion, exploitation, surveillance and the like and this she very much does.

Publishing history

First published 2024 by Random House