Pantheon
Review by Walter Cummins
Words create multiple possibilities throughout the world two adolescent siblings inhabit in Ali Smith’s latest novel, Gliff–title’s sound what the younger one, Rose, chooses to name the gray horse she rescues from the fate of a nearby abattoir.
Both are constantly exploring the meaning of new words they encounter. Bri, the elder, also called Briar and Brice, is especially fascinated by words, constantly looking up their meanings every time they encounter a new one. For Bri, “It is always exciting to me the number of things a single word could mean.”
Yet the siblings choose not to tell others their real names, which leaves them “reeling with happiness.” They also are struck with the creation of meaning. Calling a horse by an initially meaningless sound like gliff then becomes the identifier for that animal whether or not the horse knows it.
But beyond a random identity applied to a single animal, what else could that sound mean? Gliff ends up being:
a short moment. A momentary resemblance. A sudden or chance view. A transient glance. A sudden fright. A faint trace or suggestion. An inkling. A wink of sleep. A slight attack or touch of illness. A whiff. A puff. A sudden perceptible smell. A sudden passing sensation either of pain or of pleasure. A scare. A shock. A thrill. A sudden violent blow. A wallop. A nonsense word. A misspelling for glyph. A substitute word for any word. A synonym for spliff. A post-ejaculatory sex act. A mood someone’s partner gets in when they miss their partner too much and get upset about it. An organization that works for drug abuse prevention in Vienna. A brand name for an early AI tech tool used in the development of healthcare. A character in something called Ninjago. A rumour. An impulse. An instant. An unexpected view of something that startles you. A state of nervous disposition. A sudden surprising fall of sunlight.
Ultimately, any sound can convey meanings once it is given definitions. And the manipulation of definitions by those in power allows them to control the world by locking in what words are permitted to mean and dominating how they make things happen or, on the opposite end, prevent actions.
People in the world of the novel are divided into two categories—the majority who determine how words define a fixed reality and a minority like Bri and Rose who choose to explore the range of possibilities. Those in power designate such people as “unverifiables,” dangerous because they aren’t constrained by limited roles in the system.
Unverifiables are rejected by the dominant society of those who possess political power and who would never say “a war was a war when it wasn’t permitted to call it a war” or defame “the oil conglomerates by saying they were directly responsible for climate catastrophe.” Those in power use constrained language as a means of deception for political control.
Smith places the use of words at the center of her fiction: “Words themselves are a kind of touching? Words themselves are influence? Words themselves are a form of hitting? Or the other way round? Striking or touching is all about words?” But close to Gliff, Rose comes to realize that “most humans haven’t gotten clever enough to speak the languages of other creatures.” Rose wonders if humans, even though they possess language, were more deluded about the world than creatures who did not.
As one way of acknowledging the dystopian roots of Gliff, Smith revisits the title of Brave New World through a series of riddled chapter titles: Brave new w rld, Brave new o ld, rave new o ld, rave ne o ld, rave n o , ave n (i) , Brave old world, Brave you world, Brave now world, Bravo new world, Brave new word.
As the story moves toward a culmination, Bri, Rose, and Gliff return to the site of their former house and find it torn down, grass replaced with plastic turf. When a sinister van appears, Rose escapes, but Bri is captured and beaten, hair sheared and body abused until she becomes transformed into a he. Over the next five years this new he becomes promoted to a Day Shift Superior Shift Supervisor in a Delivery Level building, now a verifiable in the official system, and eventually a person who comes to know voids: “A void is simultaneously the place where, for me, words first ceased to mean and where, for words, I first ceased to mean too.” The lack of meaning closes off the possibility of understanding.
Coming to see himself as a person with the power to humiliate others, Bri recognizes the pleasure of seeing someone shrink away from his gaze. Yet that functions as a turning point, a reason to rebel by undermining and falsifying the roles of the personnel of the Packing Belt workforce, confusing who does what. Then Bri makes himself disappear from the system and finds new life in that freedom: “Now that I don’t exist I finally exist again.”
In the end, Bri manipulates the cameras on an bridge outside the Delivery Level to feign suicide. Bri’s final gesture in the novel is to fold a sheet of paper to clean mud from a farm boy’s face, blurring the written words into a new language derived from “gliff” and walking off with the boy and a horse, telling them they’ll be making up their future as they go, leaving their old one behind, escaping from the forces of power, remade by a new language: “gliff me hor momen esembl chance glanc right fain trace inkl evade scape glimm unanticipat light.”
