A poetic puzzlebox

This lyrical novel sets out to dazzle and terrify

- FIONA ROBERTS-MOORE

Gliff

Ali Smith

See what a simple line, a visible mark of the utmost simplicity and cheapness, can do to a populace? In Ali Smith's new novel, Gliff, that line is painted in crude bright red around the houses of those the state has deemed "unverified". It means ostracisation, re-education and worse. It is where the social media verification tick meets the red cross daubed on the door of plague victims in the 14th century: one of many dark and clever jokes in this dystopian puzzlebox of a story.

Smith's 13th novel (past hits include her award-winning How to be Both and her state-of-the-nation, post-Brexit Seasonal Quartet) is about two siblings who find themselves on the wrong side of that red line. It's set in a near-future Britain with enough of now in it to make it both frightening and funny. People do "nothing but look at their phones. It made them stumble about"; Shake It Off is an "old song". Tesco, Gucci and Chanel still exist, libraries do not, and children wear "educators" - smartwatches - making classrooms and teachers obsolete, too. Pollution and climate change have ravaged the landscape. The rich are "smoothed as if airbrushed, as if you really could digitally alter real people"; the poor have forgotten what real food tastes like.