By Gregory Day
FICTION
Gliff
Ali Smith
Hamish Hamilton, $34.99
As a counter-motif to modern industrialised culture, the suffering of a horse at the hands of humans is not new – think of the famous collapse of Nietzsche after supposedly witnessing the mistreatment of a horse on the streets in Turin in 1889, a scenario that could arguably be defined as the birth of post-humanism.
Or more recently, Bela Tarr’s indelible reprise and extension of Nietzsche’s episode in the opening scenes of his exacting 2011 film, The Turin Horse. Human culpability lies at the heart of the motif’s power and in Ali Smith’s new novel a horse called Gliff resides in a field of buttercups at the heart of an otherwise brutalised world.
When a pair of homeless teenage sylph-siblings called Briar and Rose sight the horse through the window of the empty house they are squatting in, its very existence seems like something from some alternative flesh-and-blood internet. Rose falls immediately in love, and takes to clearing the horse’s field of its buttercups after learning that they are poisonous to horses. Eventually, she leads Gliff out of the searing man-made weather of the enclosed field into the shelter of the bare squat, which, naturally enough, turns out to be anything but a practical solution.
The world Briar and Rose inhabit is either just up ahead or right now. As a messed-up fictional scenario it enshrines an obsolete romanticism that so many of us feel in our overheated and doom-scrolling century, when even solid common sense can seem incapable of coping with the issues that confront us. Smith’s teenage siblings are disenfranchised under the category of “unverifiables” by the state, and in her characteristic style, she riffs and riffs again on the various depersonalising scenarios that algorithmic capitalism necessarily implies.
Eventually Briar and Rose gather a community by moving from the squat into an old school building called Saccobanda, made derelict partly because everyone now learns online. The “feral” children, the horse Gliff, all the “unverifiables”, come to repurpose the dereliction. In Saccobanda things are not only post-human, post-COVID and post-Brexit, but post-dystopian as well. In other words, after her quartet of season novels and their coda Companion Piece, Smith is accustomed to the tropes of end-days.
Author Ali Smith.Credit: Getty Images
The composting of dystopian fiction as a tradition is therefore part of her mix here, in the same way that it is inevitable that a traditional folk song or an innocent animal is placed as an analogue heart in the fugueing nightmare of noughts and ones. Huxley’s Brave New World is a key touchstone and Smith’s gradual desiccation and reconstitution of the letters of that title in her chapter headings – Brave new old, rave new old, Brave new word – leaves us in no doubt that the novel is in part fuelled by the idea that even disaster has its canon.
Which brings us, of course, to history.
More than 60 years ago, the post-Marxist art critic Harold Rosenberg wrote that history’s inherent irony was that “it changes men into themselves by making them seem something else”. So too in this case Smith’s characters are wilfully redemptive animations borne from her observance of a society falling apart. As Rose continues to pursue the defiant dells of freedom we chart Briar through his eventual submission to “verification”, aka: trackable drone citizenship, in a sci-fi style workplace which cannot but help nod to where Huxley and Orwell left off. Here Smith takes the opportunity to remind us of what data cannot entrain. For it’s not only data that is an imposter for reality, it is also data’s ancestor, language, the tool of the novelist.
As we are made to reflect on how animals such as the horse, or the family dog, exist outside any name that humans may concoct for them, Nietzsche’s emblematic catastrophe seeps back into the mind. “So there was the word that made the name,” Briar thinks, “and there was the dog that it conjured in the mind, and there, beyond it, totally free of it himself, was the real dog, wagging or not wagging its tail.” The hopeful implication here is that we too, as animals, still exist outside the data.
Another of Rosenberg’s maxims was that “at the bottom of every situation lies the poetry of its ultimate wreck”. This seems as good a summary as any of what Smith’s books are best at depicting. Sure, the concocted dystopian state architecture in Gliff is apt and intertextual, but the more memorable aspects of the novel lie in the neo-folk transcendence that Rose, in particular, embodies.
Her insouciance feels a little like Smith’s approach to the novel itself, where the key traction always lies as much with the thrilling air of improvisation as it does with any obvious sense of “what happens next”. The fact is, in Smith’s fiction, what’s next has always been sistered by yesterday. We follow Briar and Rose not because they are heroes destined for triumph or failure but because we can relate to them. Yes, we too are riding a dangerous wave.
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