Ali Smith has never been afraid to take cleverness seriously. It is a distinctly European sensibility, yet its fullest vindication came amid the xenophobic pageantry of Brexit. The Seasonal Quartet was the work of an intellectual first responder, urgently cataloguing the treasures of pluralism as the body politic celebrated its sweaty fiesta of insularity.
Not many novelists could have pulled that off. It’s not as if that crisis has passed; it’s just been subsumed by bigger ones, and Smith hasn’t been standing idly by. Gliff is to be followed in 2025 by Glyph, a sister novel that will further explore “how we make meanings and .
.. are made meaningless”.
As ever, Smith delights in sportive wordplay, but those obliquely iterating titles belie a frank clarity of purpose. The world is on fire, Ali Smith is here to tell us, and this emergency calls for some urgent semiotics. It’s no accident that the proposition sounds facetious.
Semiotics, the study of signs and their meanings, is exactly the sort of zero-stakes, language-adjacent discipline that writers, by convention, are allowed to be clever about. The Name of the Rose, by trained semiotician Umberto Eco, may have been formidably erudite, but it was also titanically inconsequential. Smith doesn’t have time for any of that.
She has a crisis on her hands. In the Brexit novels, that crisis was necessarily specific, requiring a substrate of contemporary realism. This time, though, Smith grants herself more speculative.
