‘Glyph’ by Ali Smith: An exhilarating and excoriating follow-up to ‘Gliff’

Ali Smith’s Glyph is the companion novel to her earlier novel, Gliff (2024). Gliff was set in a surreal near-future dystopia. Glyph, meanwhile, is set in the present. But like Smith’s earlier Seasonal Quartet, it offers the reader an uncanny version of our world, haunted by ghostly voices from the past.

The novel focuses on two sisters, Petra and Patricia (aka Patch). The action moves between scenes from their childhood in the 1990s and their present-day estrangement.

Two chance family anecdotes of wartime tragedy have a shaping influence on their imaginative lives. One is the story of a First World War soldier who deserted the army, fleeing with a blinded horse he wished to save. We learn that he was eventually court-martialled and executed.

The other is the curious account of how a female agent, travelling under cover through France in the Second World War, discovered a mysteriously flattened corpse on the road.

When young Patch becomes distressed by the fate of the flattened man, Petra pretends that she can communicate with him in the afterlife. Episodes from his life are presented in vivid detail, and the reader is invited to speculate that the ghost may be real.

Smith teasingly draws attention to the different levels of reality at work in the novel. The...

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