Ali Smith is a Scottish writer of experimental political novels. GLYPH is her sequel to her novel Gliff (2024) but is essentially a stand-alone story. The novel focuses on the childhood of two sisters, Petra and Patricia (nicknamed Patch), in the 1990s in the UK. Their names reveal their personalities. Petra, from the Greek for stone, provides the younger sister with authority and security. Their roles reverse in the second part of the novel when Patch has to patch up and repair her older sister following Petra’s hallucinogenic incident.
The novel begins as the two young girls endure the long illness and then death of their mother. At her funeral, they hear older relatives relate two war stories that disturb and haunt the girls for the rest of their lives. The first is a World War Two story in France of a flattened man seen on the road having been run over by a tank. The second story is of a World War One soldier executed for disobedience because he refused to ‘put down’ a blind horse no longer useful in battle.
When young Patch becomes distressed by her vision of the flattened man, the older sister Petra pretends that she can communicate with the man in the afterlife. While that does help Patch recover from the war stories, it also creates an ongoing conflagration of ghosts that continue to fire the girls’ imaginations to their detriment in later life.
The second part of the novel is in current time. Petra and Patch are estranged. We know not why. This leap in time is a device for the writer to use the set-up of the war stories in the first half to explicitly condemn the Israeli government’s apartheid and genocide in Palestine, the longest and deadliest military, murderous military occupation in modern times.
This horror of expansionist slaughter brings back the memory of the war stories of their childhood. When Patch’s teenage daughter watches a distressing video of a horse trapped under tons of rubble in Gaza, the reader is no doubt that the purpose of the novel it to say that the horrors of war will continue forever.
Is it an effective novel? Does it want to make you want to end wars, stop the chaos or help the victims. I doubt it. The story is too disjointed, confused and quirky. If anything, GLYPH might tempt some readers to just give up and stop caring. The message is that there is nothing anyone can do about human stupidity.
And Glyph? What does it mean? A glyph is a crafted symbol, as in ‘hieroglyph’. There are many symbols in this experimental novel that the reader must unravel. It’s a short book, easy to read and easy to forget.
Ali writes for The Guardian, The Scotsman, the New Statesman and the Times Literary Supplement. She is a highly respected literary scholar.
GLYPH is published by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books
Available as hardback, paperback, kindle and audiobook
