It’s rare for a literary novelist to be as skilled as Ali Smith is at responding --- sometimes, it seems, at lightning speed --- to current political realities. Her Seasonal Quartet novels (actually more of a quintet with the addition of COMPANION PIECE), published in quick succession between 2016 and 2021, seemed to be responding, as if in real time, to the unfolding realities of Brexit.

Now, in GLIFF, Smith brings readers a story of two siblings who are navigating a near-future Britain, the outlines of which feel all too relatable. The book opens with the children --- Briar, who’s nonbinary, and their younger sister, Rose --- and their mother’s boyfriend, Leif, bidding farewell to their mother outside a hotel. She plans to work there for a couple of weeks, standing in for her ill sister.

"GLIFF is a mysterious, satisfying novel in its own right. But a companion volume, GLYPH...comes out next year. Readers will look forward to putting together the puzzle."

The family has been summarily evicted from their home --- an event signaled by a red line that’s been painted around their row house (at the behest of their next-door neighbors, who didn’t like the house blocking their view). Having moved into a camper van, Leif and the children awake to discover a red line encircling that as well. So they secretly decamp to an abandoned house belonging to a friend.

Having settled Briar and Rose with a quantity of canned food, Leif leaves, heading back to the city --- temporarily, he promises --- to retrieve their mother. In Leif’s absence, Rose becomes enamored of the horses that graze nearby (only growing more obsessed after Briar explains what an “abattoir horse” is). The children use all of their cash to purchase one from Colon, the young son of the landowner, and Rose names the horse Gliff.

There’s a lot about names in GLIFF, a phenomenon that won’t be too surprising to those who have read Smith’s prior work, which is often filled with linguistic playfulness and the breaking apart of words (including names). Briar provides a different name to each new acquaintance --- a form of chameleon-like impermanence that also may mirror their gender identity. At first, Briar thinks “Gliff” is just a nonsense word, a sound that Rose chooses on a whim. Later on, however, Briar uses a dictionary to discover a more than page-long list of definitions for the word, including “a substitute word for any word” and “the twinkling of an eye.”

Portions of the book --- when the siblings are homesteading and meeting the horses, and when Briar encounters a secret communal living space housed in a shuttered school, not to mention a particularly memorable fable featuring a tyrant with a gold toilet --- feel somewhat out of time. But this is very much a novel of our times, specifically an uncomfortably near future, where electronic surveillance is omnipresent and people are in danger of disappearing once they’re declared “unverified”: “One person here had been unverified for saying out loud that a war was a war when it wasn’t permitted to call it a war. Another had found herself declared unverifiable for writing online that the killing of many people by another people was a genocide.”

Given this hazardous climate and the siblings’ absence of guardians, it’s perhaps inevitable that they grow separated. Less predictable is where Briar finds themself five years later, or the harrowing process they undergo to get there. When a figure from their past shows up at the factory where they work as a supervisor (overseeing staggeringly dangerous working conditions), Briar’s past and present mingle, and they find a kind of courage foreshadowed in their own family history.

GLIFF is a mysterious, satisfying novel in its own right. But a companion volume, GLYPH, which (in much the same way that the Seasonal Quartet books complemented one another) promises to “tell a story hidden in the first novel,” comes out next year. Readers will look forward to putting together the puzzle.