Gliff, Ali Smith. Pantheon (ISBN: 9780593701560) 2025
Summary: Two “Unverifiable” children meet up with a horse slated for rendering in a courageous attempt to find their way in a dystopian world.
Two “Unverifiable” children are in flight. They have to leave their home which has been outlined in red for destruction. There mother has been called away in an emergency. Leif, her partner, piles them and their essential belongings into his campervan…until it is also circled in red after an overnight in a parking lot. A train ride takes them to a new town. Leif finds them an abandoned house, stocks them with food and some cash and leaves for a week. They see neither Leif nor their mother again.
The two are Rose and Bri whose gender is ambiguous. Bri is the narrator. Rose and Bri’s mother has avoided smartphones and other elements of the surveillance society as much as possible, so they are used to living off the grid.
As Rose explores their surroundings, she discovers a neighboring farm with a field of used-up horses feeding. She later learns it is part of a rendering operation. These horses are as much on the margins as Rose and Bri. Rose befriends one, who she names Griff, a Scottish word meaning “transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse.”
For a time, they shelter in an abandoned school with others who are “off the grid.” Oona, an older woman, becomes a kind of mentor and protector until the school is slated for demolition. The children flee on the horse. But eventually Bri is captured by the authorities,
Bri is subjected to processing and re-educated. During this, they are classified as a male. Bri becomes a manager of a factory in which child workers often suffer horrendous injuries. Bri enjoys a modicum of success and safety until someone from the past turns up. Someone who knows about Rose.
Ali Smith portrays an ugly, banal world in a dystopian totalitarianism. Everyone is surveilled, and all their information resides in vast servers. The accounts of Rose and Bri and Gliff represent a remnant of color, of personhood in this depersonalized world where people are reduced to production quotas and horses are fit only for rendering.
This is a brave new world (a motif in the second part of the book) where everything distinctive, beautiful, ambiguous, and colorful is reduced to bland functionality. It’s a world of prosperous oligarchs and a faceless society serving them. There are hints that people are eking out an existence in a climate-scorched world. It’s an uncomfortably possible future and faces us with the challenges of finding one’s personhood and meaning in a world trying to erase all of that.