Gliff—Ali Smith

[I am reading this 2024 novel in four sections, writing about each one before reading on. So far I have read two sections. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]

3 January 2026

The first half of Horse

Horse is the first long section of the novel. It’s narrated by an adolescent, Briar or Bri, forced to look after their younger sister Rose. And, really, we have no idea what is happening. Does Briar know? Not really, although these kids seem to be used to the stranger elements of the near-future world they live in. We seem to be in England where a lot of things we take for granted in the 2020s seem not to apply, or not necessarily. It seems that Ali Smith has done what plenty of other writers have been doing in our century, projected forward in time a lot of unwelcome trends that we can already see.

We’re made to feel disorientated right from the start. On the first page, Bri notes how different their mother looks in the clothes she has to wear to work at an upmarket ‘art hotel’. ‘The women and girls weren’t allowed make up or earrings or necklaces. Our mother looked smaller, duller, scrubbed clean and cloistery, like serving women from humbled countries look in films on TV.’ We’re already getting clues. The women’s dowdy uniform is different from that of the men and boys, which is ‘more casual. Their uniform was designer jeans and white T-shirts made of stuff that was better than what ordinary T-shirts get made of.’ So, less than halfway through page 1, there are already alarm bells ringing. We’ve all read The Handmaid’s Tale—you can’t get more ‘cloistery’ than the women’s clothes in the near future of that novel—and in English cities we’re used to seeing casual young men with their cloistery-dressed wives pushing prams. There are religious and cultural reasons for that—but what is Ali Smith signalling? Why do the owners want ‘humbled’-looking women serving?

We don’t immediately get any of it, because Ali Smith is careful not to let us have too much information at once. Like, what the situation is with their mother in this new role? She is covering for her sister, who isn’t well, because it appears that this is the only way she can keep the job. More alarm bells ring, to do with job security and the gig economy that more and more people are having to work in even in our own time. Later in the chapter—I’ve read eight or nine unnumbered chapters so far— Bri notes the strange otherness of the privileged classes dining there. ‘It was like they all had their backs to me, even the ones facing me. Their disconnect was what elegant meant. Like something vital had been withdrawn from them, for its own protection maybe? maybe surgically, the withdrawal of the too-much-life from people who could afford it….’

I won’t need to go into this much detail for the rest of these chapters. Through carefully-laid hints and nudges, we soon understand that the things we notice in the first chapter are part of a grim picture. The sense of division between an elite and the rest of us, a growing phenomenon in the West already, is hardening in Briar’s world. So is the shabbiness of the world that ordinary people like theirs—the siblings have a stand-in father for now, Leif, but by the third or fourth chapter he’s gone, leaving tinned supplies for a week and a small roll of banknotes, and they wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he never came back.

I called this ‘Bri’s world’, because theirs is the only voice we’re hearing. (I’m using the they/them pronoun because Ali Smith has been careful to keep their gender ambiguous.) It’s Smith’s world as well, of course, a plausible near future mostly based on what we already know. But not entirely. The divisions in society hinted at in Bri’s carefully nuanced descriptions of their mother’s uniform and the ‘elegance’ of the elites are given a far mor direct form when the family arrive home. Leif has driven them in the beaten-up old camper van Bri loves—memories of happier times—and they discover a freshly-painted red line surrounding the house they live in. This stark intrusion must be part of a new normal, as we’ve recently started calling the weirdness of changes in Western society. They all know that they can’t live there any more, so they pack what they can and leave for ‘another town.’

Locations, distances, topography…. Smith keeps it all as vague as things were in the first chapter. (What on earth is the ‘docking gate’ near the hotel? It sounds science fictiony, as Bri might describe it—and there aren’t any in the places where ordinary people live.) We can’t picture the house they’ve left, or the roads they travel on, as though Smith deliberately has Bri omit any helpful details. They are hugely perceptive and good with words—Smith likes precocious young people, usually girls, who I always suspect to be clones of her own younger self—so if things aren’t described there might well be an authorial reason for it. Maybe this world doesn’t need to be specific, it’s an archetype. Maybe we’re to think of places we know, slightly altered…

…but it’s early days yet, and a few things have been happening. And we start to get a kind of back-story. Both their mother and Leif sound like the kinds of people who read novels like this, or like we think we are, questioning things as they are and wondering whether they might ever be better. Smart phones are a thing, of course, and Bri describes how some parts of their digital version of reality might be unreliable. On the way back to the camper van, parked well away from the expensive part of town in the first chapter, Bri tells us even Google streetmaps are tricky now. ‘It was easier to navigate by the shops than by the streets so we went towards Chanel instead, biggest thing on the map. Now Gucci. Now Nike. Strange when we finally found the far side where Alana’s flat was, a place not even registering on Google as a place.’ Alana is their mother’s sister.

But I was supposed to be telling you the plot. When they have reached the town they are travelling to, the camper van breaks down, probably for good. They find a Tesco’s to buy supplies, and Leif disappears to talk to somebody who knows of somewhere where they might stay. It’s an entirely empty house—Smith’s always careful with her fictional houses—and Leif leaves them there. Bri is nominally in charge, but both of them have been brought up to be independent and Rose often does what she wants. And their mother liked to keep the use of phones to a minimum. If Bri wanted to look something up, her mother would tell her that’s what libraries are for. Bri wonders if she knows what the few remaining libraries are like now, full of computers. Maybe this is the unstated reason why Smith has made them so good with words. They know how to engage with reality, and are good at finding the right words to describe it.

On their first or second day in the new house, they walk out and discover a field with horses grazing. ‘Seven horses, small and large, all the colours of horse, beautiful and mangy, were drifting their noses across grass and ripping it with their teeth from the ground making a sound I’d never heard before.’ This is Bri’s world, a mixture of intense observation and take-it-or-leave-it Briarisms like ‘the colours of horse.’ It’s a given that we don’t need any more detail than that. It’s like the look of women in humbled countries in the first chapter. We get it.

Next. A question for our age: what’s missing from digital pictures? Answer, for Bri, any sense that these are unmanipulated versions of visual reality. In the near future, nobody really expects photographs to be digitally untouched—so when they examine the happy family in a generic image on the house-key’s key-ring, they are suspicious. Is it AI? ‘There was no such thing as AI children. You were either an alive one, or someone who’d once been a child and was now older, or a dead one; even if the children in the photo were advertising models – which did seem most likely the more I thought about it – then they were still children, or they’d been children once. Well, provided they weren’t invented by a computer collating thousands of digital images down into one single child then another and another, people who’d never existed.’

This is Ali Smith at her most questioningly curious. But it’s Bri who is nostalgic for the photographs of her mother’s, the ones you know weren’t some digital soup of images. Would it be possible to use some of the money to go back to their old house and… and what? Discover a new family living there? Or find it as empty as the one they’re now camping in? What would be the use—and besides, train prices are so expensive a ticket would cost half the money Leif has left them. While in this other part of the town, Bri sees something strange, and meets someone who, to the reader, has the air of an older version of their mother….

There’s a workman using a machine for painting red lines around an old building, with the mock-jaunty name Supera bounder. Smith makes the encounter do a lot of work. First, there’s the 79-year-old woman who tries to stop the man in his tracks as he paints. She partially succeeds, although none of the gathering group of people helps her. The man lets go of the machine and rugby-tackles her to the ground, but the machine is still on and it trundles off-course. Bri can’t help but tip it over, and ‘voluminous redness’ flows down the pavement and on to the road. A car swerves around the pool of red paint. ‘A woman on a bike guided her bike round the red like it had always been there.’ Yep, that’s what we do with these unexpected, unplanned obstacles. We’re used to it by now.

This is already a world we recognise as ours. The man had told the old woman straight away, ‘Doing my job. What I’m paid to. Don’t mess with me.’ He’s mortified when the machine goes over, because it’s no doubt the only job he can get and now he’ll be sacked. This is how 21st Century capitalism works, Smith is telling us. How does the man put it to the old woman? ‘It belongs to the people who’ve bought it, he said. They decide, not me. Not you, lady.’ In the near future, things haven’s actually moved that far. Property is property, and the owners feel they need to protect it by whatever means they like. Maybe they will pay a nominal fee for disfiguring the environment. They won’t notice it.

The woman is still very strong and active, and catches up with Bri: ‘Wait for me, you little revolutionary.’ And they have an Ali Smith-style chat, about names—‘Briar… You don’t seem the overly thorny type to me’—and cultural references, how to dodge the almost ubiquitous surveillance cameras…. The woman is Oona, a name that Bri is so polite about the woman remarks on it. But Oona isn’t polite about the folk song that gave Briar and Rose their names. ‘Piece of pure historical gender-pressurizing.’ She carries on, sounding like another Ali Smith self-portrait, and Bri carries on being the precocious younger one, trying out language like other kids try out new apps. ‘Do you believe me?’ Oona asks. ‘I’ll reserve judgement for now if you don’t mind and tell you later in our relationship,’ says Bri. And as they part company, we wonder when we will see Oona again.

Bri returns to find a pile of messy buttercups on the floor next to an opened window. Rose has been removing them from the field so that the horses’ mouths won’t be inflamed by them. A boy from the farm has told her, but the horses, Bri notices, avoid them anyway. They decide to help Rose, the horses grazing around them indifferently.

The second half of Horse

A new chapter opens with Bri trying to remember where a phrase came from, that they had used with Oona: ‘render us temporary.’ It’s their mother’s phrase, and Bri describes a time when they would overhear her and Leif talking seriously in their bedroom. ‘– group of people, Leif was saying, decides to [  ] another group of people it’s usually to show off their power to themselves via the people they’ve designated as [  ]. And if [  ] can be made to feel, as you put it, temporary—’ This is very Ali Smith, not only evoking Bri’s hesitant accumulation of understanding, but also the politically activist mindset they were raised in. At the time, presumably not long ago, Bri had borrowed the laptop to search for the meanings of ‘render’—a word that Smith has echoing through the text from now on.

The phrase reflects Bri’s growing realisation that the situation they are in is transient, interim—but between what and what? A couple of chapters later, after a description of a day at the temporary house, we get this: ‘So I’ve spent the last five years of my life not letting myself think any of this. Occasionally though, over this time, a sharp-edged piece of it surfaced in me anyway, like a pottery fragment of something….’ Five years. Bri is looking back to this brief interlude, and… is it of value? Or not? ‘Rubbish? or keepsake? the thought of my sister shaking me awake [to clear buttercups] that might be harmful to horses, horses she didn’t yet know were only there to be butchered, so that those horses wouldn’t eat them by mistake and do damage to their soft mouths.’ We don’t find out until later how different Bri’s life is now, why this memory seems so strange.

The chronology becomes less straightforward now. Bri’s clear admiration of the way their mother brought them up comes in the context of a time when, they discover, children rely on smartwatch-style ‘educators’ for everything they learn. Their mother’s ideas were old school. Learning through questioning, experience, and face-to-face interaction with other people—although they seem to have been educated at home—are the things that make both Briar and Rose different from the others.

There are developments. The farmer’s son, if that’s what he is, is Colon—they decide to call him Colin—and he’s much more suspicious of Bri than he had been of Rose. It doesn’t compute for him that neither of them knows anything about the regimented digital world he thought everyone was a part of. He can’t imagine that their mother kept them away from it all, and feels he has to explain about the educator on his wrist. The siblings are highly sceptical, especially when they realise he knows nothing of what their mother taught them about, even recent times. Taylor Swift? (That was what Rose had called herself the day before.) The Beatles? Anything at all before the digitally calibrated present? Nope. But he does know about what happens to UVs like they appear to be, the Unverifiables. He, or his brother more likely, describes a punitive, stratified society that’s a mixture of Brave New World and 1984. Except now, if you can avoid the cameras, Big Brother is on your wrist too.

Meanwhile, Rose continues to surprise Bri. Colon’s older brother, something of a bully, has told her what Bri hasn’t, that these ‘abattoir horses’—Bri hadn’t corrected her when she thought it was simply a breed—are being fattened up to be have a bolt-gun pressed to their heads. He has told her in detail what happens after that, and she is revolted by it. Some of the meat is passed for human consumption, and she becomes convinced the cheap meatballs Leif bought will be mainly horsemeat. She persuades Bri to help her and Colon—he seems to be on their side now—to free the horses. More than that, she wants to use their money to buy Gliff, her favourite. Ah.

And this is what they end up doing. By the last chapter of Horse, Gliff is inside the house, as we learn when Bri decides to let Oona know about their plan. The day after the Supera bounder incident, and on the next two days after that, Bri waits in the same spot until she sees Oona again. The old woman is well-practised in the skills of avoiding the cameras: ‘Did you know you can talk to someone without moving your lips very much?’. As I’ve already suggested, she seems to be an older version of Bri, or their mother, or Ali Smith… and I think she’s going to have a more important role yet. But…

…I need to rewind again. I told you the chronology becomes less predictable, and there’s a chapter set five years later and told in the present tense. Now, Bri is a part of the Big Brother system. Ali Smith never calls it that, of course, because she doesn’t have to. By the age of eighteen Bri’s job is to ensure that workers on a zero-skill production line don’t mess up. Smith makes it shocking because she’s so matter-of-fact about it. There’s been an unacceptable incident on the line, and a girl of about seventeen is brought before Bri. She recognises that Bri must be related to Rose, and describes how she knows her. Bri’s response, after five years of learning how to behave in the sightline of the cameras, is to affect bafflement. Instead of any human response, she stonewalls the girl. She ignores the fact that one of her hands is a stump following an industrial accident—nobody has ever admitted liability, of course—and recites the standard warning about salary loss and ‘re-education.’

But there’s something important about this encounter. The girl describes her time as an unverifiable, a serial user, ‘taking whatever I could get whenever I could get it, anything, we all were. Except her, she never took anything. We were holed up in the same cave, seven of us, we were there for quite a few weeks. I have to tell you. One of the people I most loved that I ever met. When someone’s spirit never gutters.’ But that’s not all. She uses the word: ‘Gliff. The word unbalances me so much I nearly fall forward into the fast flow of pickled vegetables rolling through on the Belt.’ So this is what has forced Bri to remember this time with the empty house and the horse—and how only Rose seemed to have any idea about what to do. Perhaps Rose, always drug-free at the cave, managed not to be rounded up with the others.

Whatever, at the end of the conversation Bri tells the girl she’s met the criteria for receiving a painkiller. ‘I place the painkiller in her hand. It’s a double. This is because the doubles are big enough to write on. I am hoping her eyesight is still good enough. She looks down at it, nods a thanks. I don’t know whether this means she’s read what’s on it or not.’ What’s going on? We know from earlier in the novel that whistleblowing notes are sometimes smuggled out of factories, and we wonder if Bri’s message might lead to something in this five-years-hence present.

Back in the main timeline, there are more hints of some form of dissidence. After watching the well-publicised efficiency of the razing of the old building—it had been a popular theatre and centre for local events—Bri notices a girl of about sixteen disappearing through a five-metre-high fence. It’s covered in details of the punishments handed out to trespassers, but Bri follows her anyway. Across a grassy park, there’s a former school, but the girl becomes threatening, and Bri leaves. But later, during an April heatwave—climate change is another thing Ali Smith needs to tick off her list, I guess—Bri and Rose are back there keeping cool. There’s a strange episode with a woman, formally a famous philosopher but now stateless and homeless, talking to them about a strange Stubbs painting of a horse frightened by a lion. (It must be a version of this one.)

Enough? I realise I haven’t mentioned their mother’s job before Rose was born, writing publicity material for a sociopathic weedkiller company. A whistleblower tells her to leave, because the product is dreadfully dangerous to life, especially unborn children like hers. The company lays people off, including their mother, because of the bad publicity and, supposedly, more expensive manufacturing practices. Is there anything at all in Smith’s future world that doesn’t feel as though it’s being run by sociopaths? Has she been reading too much news?