Glyph by Ali Smith review: 'full of chameleons and tricksters'
Rather than offering narrative resolution, in Glyph Ali Smith takes the harder path of saying there are some things we can just never know, writes Stuart Kelly
There is an old saying, but I don’t remember where I first read it. It might be a Buddhist koan or a New Yorker cartoon gag-line or a piece of French deconstructionist adage but whatever, it runs, “There may be said to be two classes of people in the world: those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not”. [It’s from an essay in Robert Benchley’s 1921 volume Of All Things! entitled “The Most Popular Book of the Month” - Ed.] It seems to me to encapsulate the work of Ali Smith. From short story collections like “Other stories and other Stories”, to her quartet that became a quintet covering the seasons, to novels such as – drum roll – How To Be Both, her work is continually cleaving in the double sense. It splits and holds together. Triple sense if you include “cleaver” as the plant commonly known as “sticky willy” – catchy, entangling and annoying.
Glyph, the publicity says, “unravels a story hidden in the first part of the duology” – Gliff, which was published last year. It is not a sequel or – as the fifth part of the quartet was – a “companion piece”, but it is also “a standalone novel” according to the back of my copy; which I cannot confirm or deny since I had read Gliff already. As Roald Dahl wrote in Matilda, “never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it.”
Gliff was a near-future dystopia, in which two siblings, Rose and Bri, found a horse and then found themselves lost. It ended on a great narrative fermata. Glyph has another two siblings, Petra, the elder, and Patch, the younger. It opens with a typical Smith matryoshka of stories within stories, and typically Smith-style cadenzas on the labyrinth being part of the ear and the meanings of “stanchion”. Here we have a story about a horse rather than a real horse. Moreover, here we have people reading a novel: “It was okay, I say. It was quite good. I thought it was quite well written and everything. A bit too dark for me. A bit too clever-clever, a bit too on the nose politically, for a novel. I’d have preferred a bit more world-building. And what’s with all that horse stuff?” I wonder how many of my peers re-read their copy at that point.
The more important thing is that, as children, Petra and Patch colluded themselves into believing in a ghost. The backstory behind this – their flight – is sensitively done, as is their cessation of such “storytelling”. Their later alienation from each other is rooted in their folie à deux. In the present, their past raising of spirits is having an equine and unwanted presence in Petra’s flat. In the second part, sisters despite all, Patch goes, with her daughter Bill. Bill is a welcome presence in Smith’s fictions. Bill is snarky, petulant, committed, wrong-headed, vulnerable, incisive, blinded, despairing, hopeful – the perfect depiction of a teenager. Bill is the antithesis of the sometimes cosy liberalism here. I judge your virtue by how much you would personally lose to achieve your aims. That’s me, not Bill, but I suspect Bill would agree.
In classic form, Smith has created a diminuendo in terms of the section headings (“nod”, “wink”, “blind horse”) that is actually an acceleration. There is the same glee here, but it is very much in the midnight not dawn edges of the spectrum. In one of the stories there is a description of witnessing a corpse literally flattened by tanks, but that does not detract nor distract from Smith swerving into a literary-theoretical discussion on what makes a two dimensional character. It has, unfortunately, some transcriptions of texted phone chats and I can never tell where they sit on the satire scale.
Of the two books, I far preferred Glyph to Gliff. Bravely, Smith decides not to do any form of narrative resolution to Gliff. Michel Faber attempted, with The Crimson Petal and the White, to leave everything as unknowable as life itself, but capitulated with a collection, The Apple. Smith takes the harder path of saying that there really are some things we can just never know. In terms of criticisms of her politics, here there is a horror I thought previously occluded, especially when narrating the death of Ukrainian journalist (unnamed here, but it is Viktoria Roshchyna), and there is one un-gruesome detail that should chill anyone with a heart. The novel’s final sequence of parables has the best line – “if you’re going to find yourself living in Draconia, best to speak some draconian”.
At the same time, Glyph has the same dichotomy problem. Although Smith’s work is full of chameleons and tricksters and shapeshifters and un-pin-downables, it eventually collapses the way quantum effects resolve. Eventually there is always a Manichean good or bad, light or dark, Dionysian or Apollonian. I would be very interested indeed if Smith were to write about change which was not the kind of slippery kaleidoscopes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but the radical, road to Damascus, Saul becomes Paul change. To my mind, that is the more truly political option. Not the carnival, the confessional.
Glyph, by Ali Smith, Hamish Hamilton, £20
The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today
Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our new WhatsApp channel here
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.