Glyph is the most recent of two novels, which can stand alone or be read together. Its companion novel Gliff describes a tyrannical malignant state where data decides destiny. Within it, a horse is named Gliff: a word with multiple meanings. A horse is also released into the pages of Glyph.
In Glyph, two young siblings Petra and Patricia meet an elderly woman. She tells them how in world war two she encountered a man who has been flattened, perhaps by a tank.
“There was no face left on the head. There was nothing distinctive left of whoever this person had been, nothing but a gesture to the shape of something that had once been human.”
That night Petra hears Patricia crying about the man. Petra soothes Patricia by pretending she can speak to the man’s ghost. The ghost tells her he was in pain, but it was not for long. Petra then makes up episodes in his life, and they name the man Glyph.
Disbelief
Patricia and Petra’s narrative thread oscillates between childhood and 2026 where wars fill television screens. These are also combined with the story of Glyph, and the story of a soldier in world war one who frees a blind horse and who is later shot for deserting his post. The stories cross into each other, so it is difficult for the reader to find a stable foothold within any one narrative.
In pivotal scenes Petra (now an adult) has been looking up the man Glyph on the internet, at the same time she hears the sound of a horse crashing about in her spare room. Spooked, she contacts Patricia, who comes to see her with Bill, her aware adopted daughter. Bill had briefly been arrested, absurdly for holding a scarf.
“It was thought that the scarf waved like a flag, …. could have been said to be in tacit support of a newly proscribed organisation…”
Seeing the smashed-up room Patricia believes the horse was there. However, Bill sees the room and smells the horse: the physical evidence of a horse she has identified as a ghost but denies that it can exist. This further wrongfoots the reader who does not know where to suspend their disbelief within the ontological layers. Like the horse, meaning is crashing about all over the place. The implicit question to the reader is, what are you willing to believe?
Bad Faith
Petra and Patricia get drunk and talk about their childhood and Glyph. Bill dismisses them as mad and shouts.
“Open your eyes.
Look past yourselves.
See where we are now.
Look what’s happening.
Get to the real story.”
The reader may identify with Bill’s frustration. She has been preoccupied and distressed by the vicious maiming and murder of a war journalist. But denying the ghost horse can be seen as a type of bad faith. Bill realises if Patricia and Petra are delusional about Glyph and the ghost horse, then she too is delusional in being haunted by the dead journalist.
Inexorably we are led to believe the stories all have a sense of reality: the man who was run over, the soldier who was shot and the journalist who was killed. Moreover, however you get there, paying attention to the victims of war is better than looking away.
‘Flat’ characters
Ali Smith does not dwell on individual psychology or biography, and she does not deploy characters as static literary devices. Her characters shift about in depth. Glyph reveals character through action, but it toys with the notion of the flat character. Glyph is literally flat, but Patricia and Petra give him back substance and a life. He represents the dead as their call to us.
When Bill is arrested, she has an ‘appropriate adult’ visit her at the police station. The appropriate adult responds numbly from her role. Occasionally she shows signs of authenticity, but when Bill talks about the war and people shot while queuing for food, she disengages. She withdraws herself by choosing to retreat from meaning.
The Shadow
The symbol of the shadow recurs throughout the novel. The flat man Glyph is initially mistaken for a shadow and Patricia describes herself as Petra’s shadow.
At a key point, the world war one soldier and the blind horse walk together.
“Green shadow accompanies the horse. Green shadow casts him too. Green shadow precedes them. It forms them both.”
One interpretation of this sublime image is that an entirely flat (lifeless) person cannot have a shadow. The shadow therefore connotes life. The horse loosely symbolises meaning making and the shadow precedes the horse and soldier; so, existence precedes meaning. In Glyph meaning is intricately bound to life.
Glyph
As a metafiction, Glyph often contains obscure ideas and imperceptible structures. If it was only built on ideas, it would be artificial and empty. But it is grounded in contemporary life: the persistent presence of wars on screens, the appropriate adult’s deadened communication and the repeated cautions to look where we are going. The kinships within this not always dystopian world are frequently funny and affecting, and the passages about loss and grief are firmly human.
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