Never intentionally ignorant, Ali Smith pre-empts the most likely criticisms of her latest novel, Glyph, when a character says: "I'm just not sure that books that are novels and fiction and so on should be so close to real life... or so politically explicit."
Glyph, which follows sisters Petra and Patch as they reflect on their childhood attempts to grapple with the finality of death after their mother's loss, goes further than any of Smith's recent works in strongly answering this charge. While Seasonal Quartet playfully anatomized post-Brexit Britain's social breakdown, and the immediate predecessor Glyph dealt with the violence of a securitized state, Glyph, with its explicit engagement with the Israeli government's apartheid and genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, raises the ethical stakes decisively. To engage with Smithian wit – it is art in the mechanical age of mass destruction.
As with most of Ali Smith's novels, Glyph's primary strength comes from its commitment to excavating the sediment of language; its etymological resonance and impact. For example, Petra and Patch's primary relationship is lightly sketched: playful, delicate, and tender. But it was their names, rather than their characterization, that stayed with me long after reading. Petra, from Greek for stone, with its echoes of scale, hardness, authority; contrasting with Patch, meaning repair, with its echoes of care, survival, persistence. In a novel so actively engaged with "one of the longest and most deadly military occupations in modern history," their names provide a constant and deeply disturbing drumbeat, a stark and dissonant reminder.
Similarly, the two central images of the novel draw their potential directly from the everyday horrors of extended massacres. The two sisters hear a story from World War II about a young soldier flattened by a tank and whose corpse rots on the road. Later, they begin to communicate half-seriously with his ghost, whom they call Glyph. On the one hand, Smith plays with the question of what makes a character "flat" and what gives them a three-dimensional face. On the other hand, especially given that many readers will have vivid images and accounts of Gaza firmly in their minds, Smith raises ethically essential questions about the representation of the dead, who gets to speak and who is ultimately silenced. When Patch's teenage daughter watches a disturbing video of a horse trapped under rubble, she notes, "That's probably Gaza." We leave little doubt as readers.
We also leave little doubt when we encounter the disappointed, desperate descriptions of the thousands of people in Gaza seeking "aid": "You hear about the people queuing for food and the snipers shooting at them and how the snipers don't shoot them just randomly, they're also playing a shooting game? So on some days they shoot people in the hands, on some days in the heads?"
This quote continues, listing different body parts; an incredulous, horrifying, breathless cascade of words. Smith's tonal ability as a writer also achieves great effect during the bureaucratic, authoritarian absurdity. Patch's daughter, likely hoping the government will do something beyond writing a stronger written check against Israel's war crimes, is arrested for "aggressively" waving a scarf. Her mother is later told that "waving a scarf by itself is not a criminal offense, unless the scarf-waving is connected to a banned organization... it is considered that the scarf that her daughter waved like a flag might be a covert support for a newly banned organization, and the officers on the scene now have to consider any gesture in the light of this ban."
It is a bold step to be so morally unflinching, especially in the face of perceived aesthetic orthodoxy that so often favors distance and irony, but in Glyph we see a major British writer answering the call of the day when so many others have hesitated or turned away. There is also something about Smith's unwavering focus on language that makes her particularly well-suited to this task. As Orwell reminded us: "Political language... is designed to make lying believable and murder respectable, to give an air of legitimacy to the most outrageous acts." Smith's sensitivity is well attuned to the flood of passive voice headlines, asymmetric categorizations, direct linguistic inversions, and semantic absurdities that accompany increasingly desperate attempts to justify the unjust.
Glyph is described as "family" to its predecessor, Gliff, primarily by mood and homophone. Typical of Smith to begin with a teasing gesture, a joke, only to reveal the heart of the matter as we fully engage with the language itself. Glyph, a Scots dialectal word meaning to be glimpsed or suddenly startled, sits alongside Glyph, meaning to be incised, marked, or engraved. From the outset, we are in no doubt: we have moved from the fleeting to the permanent, from the fleeting image to the incised and unalterable. We have moved from observers to witnesses. Whatever the darkness, we can never say we did not see.
