Ali Smith's Glyph: A Morally Unflinching Literary Response to Gaza
In her latest novel Glyph, celebrated British author Ali Smith delivers what has been described as a morally unflinching work that directly confronts the ongoing war in Gaza. This powerful second instalment in a sharp duology represents Smith's most explicit political engagement to date, offering a profound interrogation of language in what she terms the age of mechanical mass destruction.
From Fiction to Witness: Smith's Political Evolution
Smith anticipates potential criticism of her approach through a character who questions whether novels should be so close to real life or so politically blatant. Yet Glyph answers this challenge decisively, moving beyond the Brexit-era social fractures explored in her Seasonal Quartet and the state violence examined in predecessor Gliff. Here, Smith engages explicitly with what she presents as Israeli government apartheid and genocide in Palestine, raising ethical stakes to unprecedented levels within her literary career.
The Power of Language and Naming
True to Smith's signature style, Glyph derives its primary power from meticulous linguistic excavation. The central relationship between sisters Petra and Patch is delicately rendered, but it's their names that resonate profoundly. Petra, from the Greek for stone, evokes solidity and authority, while Patch, meaning to repair, suggests care and persistence. In a novel confronting one of the longest and deadliest military occupations in modern history, these names create a persistent, affecting rhythm that underscores the narrative's political engagement.
Confronting Horrors Through Narrative
Smith employs powerful central images drawn from expansionist violence. The sisters encounter a story about a young soldier flattened by a tank during the second world war, whose body is left to rot in the road. They later communicate with his ghost, naming him Glyph. This device allows Smith to explore questions of character dimensionality while raising substantive ethical questions about representations of the dead and who gets to speak versus who is silenced.
The novel doesn't shy from contemporary parallels. When Patch's teenage daughter watches distressing footage of a horse trapped under rubble, she notes it was probably Gaza, leaving readers in little doubt about the reference. Smith presents horrifying descriptions of people killed while seeking aid in Gaza, including snipers allegedly playing a kind of shooting game targeting different body parts on different days.
Bureaucratic Absurdity and State Power
Smith's tonal mastery extends to satirising British state bureaucracy. Patch's daughter is arrested for waving a scarf aggressively, with authorities explaining that scarf waving is not in itself a specific criminal offence unless the waving of a particular scarf relates to a proscribed organisation. This absurd bureaucratic language highlights the state's mechanisms for controlling dissent while Britain's response to Israeli actions is reduced to writing a strongly worded cheque.
Language as Political Weapon
Smith's relentless focus on language proves particularly suited to addressing contemporary political discourse. As George Orwell observed, political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. Smith's sensibility is finely tuned to confront the avalanche of passive-voice headlines, asymmetric categorisations, linguistic inversions and semantic absurdities that accompany attempts to justify the unjustifiable.
From Glimpse to Engraving: The Duology's Evolution
Glyph is described as family to its predecessor Gliff, connected by mood and homophone. The titles themselves reveal the duology's progression: Gliff, a Scottish vernacular word meaning to glimpse briefly or be startled suddenly, contrasts with Glyph, meaning to carve, mark or engrave. This linguistic shift signals movement from the fleeting to the permanent, from passing observation to indelible witness. As Smith demonstrates through her courageous engagement, we have moved from being observers to becoming witnesses who can never claim we did not see, regardless of the darkness confronted.
In an era where many writers equivocate or turn away, Ali Smith's Glyph represents a major British literary figure answering the call of our times with moral clarity and linguistic precision. The novel stands as a testament to fiction's capacity to bear witness to historical tragedy while interrogating the very language through which we comprehend such events.
