Every classic old horse story I’ve ever chanced upon in this brave new unlibraried world deals with the bloodiness of humanity to other creatures as well as each other and more often than not ends in dutiful sadness as if the story, not totally broken, is at least broken in. [loc. 992]
Rose and Bri come home from a visit to their mother (who's taken on her sister's job). Their mother's boyfriend, Leif, is driving the campervan, but he abandons them after they find a red line painted around the outside of their house -- and later, of their campervan. He leaves them with enough canned food to last them a while...
Bri is befriended by an elderly activist, and introduced to a loose collective of 'unverifiables', who've been excluded from the system, from society -- like Rose and Bri themselves, and likely also their mother and Leif. "One person here had been unverified for saying out loud that a war was a war when it wasn’t permitted to call it a war. Another had found herself declared unverifiable for writing online that the killing of many people by another people was a genocide. Another had been unverified for defaming the oil conglomerates by saying they were directly responsible for climate catastrophe."
Bri is all for revolution: Rose befriends a horse in a field near the empty house they're squatting in, and names it Gliff. Bri, who loves words, finds an actual printed dictionary and discovers that 'gliff' has a multitude of meanings.
And then Rose and Bri (the latter of who's non-binary: to the question 'are you a boy or a girl?', they answer 'yes') are separated, and there's a gap of five years when the grimness of the 'reeducation centres', and the more-or-less-forced labour awaiting the underclass, is exposed. But there's a hopeful ending, too, and a spark of revolution.
I love Ali Smith's wordplay, especially in the seasonal quartet (Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer, plus Companion Piece) though didn't quite connect with Gliff. In some ways the future it depicts felt all too probable, and horribly close: in others, it lacked detail, depth. And Bri's story didn't feel resolved. Gliff does have a companion volume (Glyph), which I own and have pushed up the TBR list. Perhaps reading that will help me appreciate Gliff as the author intended.
Read because: Ali Smith! And fits the reading challenge 'about a horse, or a horse on the cover' (both).
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