Gliff

Audiobook

English language

Published Oct. 31, 2024 by Penguin Books Ltd..

O brave new world, that has such people in’t.

Once upon a time not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint encircling the outside of their house.

What does it mean?

It’s a truism of our time that it’ll be the next generation who’ll sort out our increasingly toxic world.

What would that actually be like?

In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take?

And what’s a horse got to do with any of this?

Gliff is a novel about how we make meaning and how we are made meaningless. With a nod to the traditions of dystopian fiction, a glance at the Kafkaesque, and a new take on the notion of classic, it’s a moving and …

O brave new world, that has such people in’t.

Once upon a time not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint encircling the outside of their house.

What does it mean?

It’s a truism of our time that it’ll be the next generation who’ll sort out our increasingly toxic world.

What would that actually be like?

In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take?

And what’s a horse got to do with any of this?

Gliff is a novel about how we make meaning and how we are made meaningless. With a nod to the traditions of dystopian fiction, a glance at the Kafkaesque, and a new take on the notion of classic, it’s a moving and electrifying read, a vital and prescient tale of the versatility and variety deep-rooted in language, in nature and in human nature.

6 editions

Fionnáin reviewed Gliff by Ali Smith

Apocalyptic-hopeful

5 stars

In times like ours, dystopic novels can be a little too close to the bone. So I was a little reluctant to dig into this one initially, despite it having great reviews. But after a few chapters it was clear that this is an atypical example of the genre, telling a story in a unique, and often hopeful way.

Gliff centres on two sisters and their position in society. The narrator tells memories of their gradual exclusion as undesirables in a society that does not fight for them. The memories slowly catch up to the present, where the gradual has become sudden and there is a clear division between people who are welcome in society, and those who are not. But even within all this, there is a hopeful edge in the resistance of characters, and in how they find one another and push against a system that would …

In times like ours, dystopic novels can be a little too close to the bone. So I was a little reluctant to dig into this one initially, despite it having great reviews. But after a few chapters it was clear that this is an atypical example of the genre, telling a story in a unique, and often hopeful way.

Gliff centres on two sisters and their position in society. The narrator tells memories of their gradual exclusion as undesirables in a society that does not fight for them. The memories slowly catch up to the present, where the gradual has become sudden and there is a clear division between people who are welcome in society, and those who are not. But even within all this, there is a hopeful edge in the resistance of characters, and in how they find one another and push against a system that would rather control or eradicate them.

The story is vivid, at times violent and heartbreaking, but also dreamlike and weird. And for this last feature, it is really wonderful. It also analyses language and culture in a way that I really enjoyed, interrogating how the words we use can create the worlds we live in. Somehow, a horse called Gliff takes centre stage, finding itself in uncanny and unusual situations with the sisters as they approach this brave new world.

I had not read any of Ali Smith's work before, but I am a convert now and hope to read a lot more by her in the coming years.

enne📚 reviewed Gliff: A Novel by Ali Smith

5 stars

I quite enjoyed this book.

Was a horse more lost to the world, because of no words, or was the horse more found – or even founded – in the world because of no words?

Were we in our worded world the ones who were truly deluded about where and what we believed about all the things we had words for?

Gliff is a surveillance dystopia novel—thematically about words, borders, and questions about authentic reality.

The point of view in this book is a child being raised on the margins of a system; they're an unreliable narrator who doesn't quite understand everything enough about the world to lay it out explicitly for the reader.

Stylistically, the writing is a stream of consciousness in the narrator's head, relating the past. Sometimes not having quotation marks for speech can feel jarring for me as a …

I quite enjoyed this book.

Was a horse more lost to the world, because of no words, or was the horse more found – or even founded – in the world because of no words?

Were we in our worded world the ones who were truly deluded about where and what we believed about all the things we had words for?

Gliff is a surveillance dystopia novel—thematically about words, borders, and questions about authentic reality.

The point of view in this book is a child being raised on the margins of a system; they're an unreliable narrator who doesn't quite understand everything enough about the world to lay it out explicitly for the reader.

Stylistically, the writing is a stream of consciousness in the narrator's head, relating the past. Sometimes not having quotation marks for speech can feel jarring for me as a reader, but somehow here it lent itself to a feeling in the narrator's head, of a story being told stream of consciousness style. Because this book focuses on words, there's also some fun wordplay.

Despite being a dystopian story, all of this gives it a dreamy quality that I quite enjoyed.