Billed as “family to Gliff”, that being Ali Smith’s 2024 dystopian take on a Kafkaesque future Britain, Glyph is more a refraction than a sequel (though the homophonous Gliff exists within Glyph as a novel discussed by several characters).
Narrated from the present, Glyph follows two sisters who, as children, created an imaginary friend based on a soldier killed during the second World War (with a second tale about a blind horse from the first World War being equally important to them). As pre-teens, this “spirit game” involved silly efforts to speak with the dead; as adults, however, it primes them for the appearance of disruptor figures in our age of social, economic and geopolitical turmoil.
Glyph, which the sisters name their ghost, is literally that, a signifier for things the protagonists cannot say. Steamrolled by a military convoy, death has reduced him to two dimensions (with the mischievous Smith having fun contemplating the idea of “flat” characters). Yet Glyph nonetheless becomes a player in a “psychohysterical family game that has its own rules and language”, a revenant weaving in and out of the sisters’ lives. He is key to their relationship with absence “and the thing you put in place of the absence”.
[ Gliff by Ali Smith: Part allegory, part dystopian fiction, altogether thrillingOpens in new window ]
Through Glyph the ghost, Glyph the novel exhibits a light touch of hauntology (Jacques Derrida’s conception of how past ideas continually haunt the present). This is visible not just in the novel’s many spectres (both figurative, literal and metafictional in its echoes of Gliff), but also in its probing flashbacks to the “liberated wild and free 1990s”, the so-called End of History era that originally provoked Derrida’s idea (and Smith, as ever, knows exactly what she’s doing, with Hamlet’s father — Derrida’s go-to example of literary hauntings — getting a sly nod along the way).
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Short, smart and bleakly funny, Glyph is fuelled by incredulity at the state of contemporary England (as with Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, this is very much a state-of-the-nation book). The author manages to estrange readers from reality by doing nothing more than describing things exactly as they are. But, crucially, the novel never feels didactic. This is a light, engaging and entertaining read. It is a ghost story, sure, but what truly haunts its characters are lost opportunities.
