Book review: Glyph

In the time between reading about Glyph and receiving a copy, I had forgotten entirely what it was about. But I looked forward to reading it, as a long-time Ali Smith-curious. For years, I would see her works in bookstores. I picked them up and put them back. I don’t know why I never read any, or why they had this hold on me.

In a bookshop recently, I saw another Ali Smith book—this one titled Gliff. I furrowed my brow and opened Gliff, but the blurb and the first pages were no help—I’d read neither on Glyph.

Gliff is a book written by Ali Smith, and Glyph is another book written by Ali Smith. Had I read the back of Glyph, I might have seen this:

“A standalone novel, it’s family to Gliff (2024).”

Oh, well.

I am compelled to say that I hated this book, in the physical sense—the edges of the raw cardboard deteriorated like it was going out of fashion whenever the book was in my bag. But that is no reason not to read it. (Perhaps think about an ebook?)

Glyph is a book about bearing witness to the war in Gaza, who is allowed a voice and who is silenced, ghosts, and having a sister.

In the first chapter, Petra is playing Duolingo second screening in front of the television.

I can’t turn the TV news screen off. That would be an admittance not just of my hopelessness and helplessness but of my callousness. I leave it on because, like everybody else now I’m a person who can cope with several screens … I sit in the stupid museum of myself and act like it’ll matter that I’m learning a language I don’t speak from a machine.

Petra’s professed helplessness is contradicted when her almost-niece, Billie, is introduced in a police station, apprehended for waving a scarf in a markedly aggressive manner. Throughout the story, Billie grapples with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict much more directly than the other characters do.

Her arrest is explained to her adoptive mother Patricia—sister to Petra—this way:

It was thought that the scarf waved by your daughter could have been said to be in tacit support of a proscribed organisation … in this instance as it happens the scarf your daughter was waving has been judged not to have been being directly used in support of the said proscribed organisation. But it also says here that the officers present judged that your daughter’s intent could be said to have been hostile.

Smith’s skill with language is on full display here, playing with the absurdity and authoritarianism of Britain’s response to the Free Palestine movement.

On the topic of language, I’ll go briefly back to Smith’s bibliography: per Merriam Webster, gliff is a Scottish word meaning glimpse, a faint trace, a sudden fright, a brief moment. Glyph is an English word, from the Greek glyphe,meaning carved work. Impermanent, permanent. The message seems to be that what is being done in Gaza can’t be undone.

It’s worth noting that cleave, which means both to sever and to adhere firmly, also derives from glyphe. (Okay, you got me—the second definition of cleave comes from Old High German. Bear with me.) The idea of being severed and joined simultaneously brings us to the central relationship of Glyph: Petra and Patricia (who is nicknamed Patch).

There is impressive verisimilitude to the closeness and the distance of Petra’s relationship with Patch. I find that sibling relationships seem to be difficult for writers to carry off. But here it feels intimately, lovingly, frustratingly real. Through memory, we see pieces of the sisters’ childhood. What starts as a game to console Patch over a relative’s story about a man flattened by a tank morphs into a long-lived communication with a ghost. Both know it’s make-believe, but neither admits it. In adulthood, Petra regrets having made up stories about a real man who had died.

As a child, another relative tells another story to Petra, about a soldier “of the best and highest qualities killed by his own side.” Smith asks the reader, can the cost of doing the right thing ever be too high?

I think I’m finally ready to read Ali Smith. Read this book — but maybe wait for an alternate edition.