Decency, human connection, and art provide a life-enhancing foundation that offsets despair with delight. Compassion and hope appear alongside clever structural innovations and verbal playfulness in ambitious works. The Seasonal Quartet, written during and about Brexit and Covid, and How to Be Both, linking two loosely connected narratives across centuries through a Renaissance mural, show flexible reading and imaginative form. New novels Gliff and Glyph, published a year apart, carry similar titles but different tonal balances. Gliff presents a bleak Orwellian dystopia where a cruel regime strips rights and targets “unverifiables,” including children, for abuse. Glyph restores a darker-and-lighter balance. Both novels include preternaturally wise children who lose their mother too young, with Gliff centering a brother and sister navigating the new world order.
"How does Scottish author Ali Smith manage to offset despair with delight even in novels that tackle serious issues such as loss, grief, war, injustice, and insidious curtailments of freedom? The answer lies partly in her fervent belief in the life-enhancing powers of decency, human connection, and art, which underpins all her work. Along with compassion and hope, she has brought clever structural innovations and verbal playfulness to ambitious projects like her masterful Seasonal Quartet, written during and about the stark days of Brexit and Covid, and How to Be Both, in which two narratives loosely connected by a Renaissance mural, but separated by centuries, can be read in either order."
"Bleakness dominates last year's Gliff, a chilling Orwellian dystopia about a cruel political regime that strips people of their rights and subjects these so-called "unverifiables" including children -- to abuse. Newly published and tangentially related, Glyph restores Smith's usual balance between darkness and light. Both novels are thought-provoking, although somewhat less beguiling than her usual fare. Gliff, the reader is told, is a Scottish vernacular term meaning to glimpse briefly or to be startled suddenly."
"Its homophone, glyph, means to carve, mark or engrave as in petroglyphs. So one is temporary; the other, etched in stone, is more permanent. Like much of Smith's work, both novels involve preternaturally wise children who lose their mother too young. Gliff features a brother and sister, aged 16 and 12, bravely trying to navigate the scary new world order on th"
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