January 21, 2025
2 read me
Book Review: That Chillingly Familiar Fictional Dystopia
A novel set in a near-future surveillance state charts the path to liberation
fiction
Glyph
Author: Ali Smith.
Pantheon, 2025 ($28)
In a totalitarian version of Britain, somewhere in the near present or near future, people are desirables deemed “unverified” by worker drones or a vague gray authority. This is the background Glyph, A new novel by award-winning Scottish author Ali Smith.
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The foreground and background are almost indistinguishable here. They overlap and transcend each other in this wordplay-loving liberation story, explaining and dissecting terms, full of incidental etymology and puns. Smith’s didacticism is camouflaged in conversation, a series of clever lessons about the minute histories of words and the vagaries of language.
In the foreground, two children tumble down an abandoned waterfall, struggling to stay fed and find their footing in a city where, at night, red lines can be painted around where they are sleeping. They are separated first from the loving whistling mother who raised them, then from the man who commissioned them, and finally and mysteriously from each other. Woven into this tapestry in an artful mix are critiques of xenophobia, capital, and soulless technocratic overlords, all very relevant in the America of 2025, where, as the specter of mass deportation looms, it’s easy to read Smith’s dystopia as a fairly accurate description. of the time we live in.
But “dystopia” is probably a misnomer. There are many imagined styles in Smith’s fictional setting, such as the literal lines of red paint and the “Supera Bounder” machines that draw them, but the surveillance state it creates is not far removed from institutionally sanctioned forms of surveillance and oppression. In the UK, CCTV cameras are everywhere; In the US, private corporations have almost unlimited access to personal data; Across the Global North, immigrants and refugees are increasingly targeted for exclusion or expulsion by hostile governments.
what Glyph suggests that dystopia is no longer a counterfactual. Today the light is present and pervasive, and it is up to us to cast off our chains.
