‘Gliff’, by Ali Smith: urgency enters, complexity exits | Babelia

After being diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, at 30 Ali Smith (Inverness, 1962) left her post at a university near Glasgow and moved to Cambridge to become a writer. free lovehis first book of short stories, was published in 1995. Ashis first work of any length, came out in 1997. Since then he has published six collections of short stories, a book of essays, two plays and 12 novels, four of the latest —Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summerher “Seasonal Quartet”, originally published between 2017 and 2019, have earned her the position of some as the most important British writer of her generation.

He published 21 books in 30 years, as well as hundreds of articles in Caretaker and other publications – requires a huge amount of talent and work. But also something else, which perhaps we can call a “sense of urgency”. Smith has always been a strident critic of the economic system and the destruction of nature, as well as increased surveillance and population control; However, since Brexit in 2016, its questioning has taken on the character of a warning: that we are running out of time to prevent the emergence of a post-enlightenment and post-humanist – that is, post-democratic – society in which there is no longer a shared language to talk about experience, offer some kind of resistance, come together, create community.

Gliff It takes place in a society like that and in a future that we feel is close to us. After her mother disappears, Briar, her little sister Rose, and her mother’s boyfriend return to their country home to find that it has been surrounded with red paint during their absence. They spend the night in their camper, in the parking lot of a supermarket: the next day, when they discover that someone has painted another fence with red paint, this time around the vehicle, they abandon that too. Soon the mother’s boyfriend leaves and the children find a horse about to be sacrificed. Rose forms a bond with him and names him “Gliff”. “A word that can replace any word,” says Briar. “A word that not only means many things, but can mean them all.” AND “no one at a time.”

For the brothers the present is freedom and loss. They will find other children who have lost their parents. In this way they will create their own community and, later, join a resistance movement. The story could end well, despite everything. (A second part was just announced.) But Gliff is tremendously disturbing, and it’s no surprise that part of the book was published in A cage went out looking for a bird“ten Kafkaesque stories” written by Charlie Kaufman, Elif Batuman, Helen Oyeyemi and others. As in Kafka, the red line that delimits Gliff property and people arises from the intelligence of an omnipotent and enigmatic bureaucracy that we do not understand but which has already destroyed us.

One of the central ideas of Smith’s work is that language is a battlefield. Totalitarian societies, remember, do not limit themselves to establishing police bodies, but also control the expression, and for this reason, in the world of Gliff People are punished for calling a war a “war” and denouncing polluting companies, museums are turned into hotels, and public schools and libraries are abandoned. By the same token, Smith conveys to her characters a curiosity and pleasure in the use of words that, however, and although the author is celebrated for her formal innovation and narrative audacity, she herself does not appear to have experienced while writing this book.

Gliff continues along the line of reduction of the narrative complexity and simplification of the style that inaugurated the ‘Seasonal Quartet’, and could be read as a youth novel if it were not for the fact that it is clear that the author wants it to be read differently, as demonstrated by the references to Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf and to fairy tales: adolescent protagonists, gadgets technological, an external danger with widespread contours, the exploration of the physical and moral limits of the world, the belief in the idea that adolescents are natural enemies of authoritarianism which the most recent investigations disprove, etc. There are no games with time here As nor the audacity of the narrators of There but for the or the complexity – and, therefore, the richness – of the narrative How to be both and other books by the author. It seems that among the many elements of his careful analysis of how we are headed to an unpleasant and depressing place is that a visible urgency can only be expressed with risk-free clarity.