Review of Ali Smith’s avatar – a witness to the war in Gaza | imaginary

nAli Smith, without knowing it at all, anticipates the most likely criticism of her latest novel, Glyph, when one character says: “I’m not sure books that are novels and fantasy and so on should be so close to real life…or so politically blatant.”

Glyph, which follows sisters Petra and Patch as they reflect on their childhood attempts to grapple with the inevitability of death after losing their mother, goes further than any of Smith’s other works in forcefully responding to this charge. Whereas Seasonal Quartet dissected social fracture in post-Brexit Britain, and its immediate predecessor Gleave dealt with security state violence, Gleave, in its frank engagement with the Israeli government’s apartheid and genocide in Palestine, decisively raises moral stakes. Engaging in a Smithian pun is an art in an age of mechanical mass destruction.

As with most of Ali Smith’s novels, Gleave’s primary strength comes from its commitment to excavating the deposits of language; Echoing its etymology and inference. For example, the basic relationship between Petra and Patch is lightly drawn: playful, sensitive, and kind. But it was their names, not their descriptions, that stayed with me long after reading. Petra, a Greek word meaning stone, with echoes of its size, solidity and authority; It contrasts with correction, which means repair, with echoes of care, survival, and perseverance. In a novel that actively engages with one of the “longest and most dangerous military occupations in modern history,” their names provide a constant and deeply moving drumbeat, stark and dissonant.

Likewise, two of the novel’s central images derive their power directly from the daily horror of expansionist carnage. The sisters hear a story from World War II, about a young soldier who was crushed by a tank and whose body was left to rot in the road. Later they began to half-seriously communicate with his ghost, calling him Glyph. On the one hand, Smith plays with the question of what makes a character “flat” versus what makes a character three-dimensional. On the other hand, especially when many readers have images and reports of similar deaths in Palestine strongly on their minds, Smith raises fundamental ethical questions about representations of the dead, about who can speak and who is crucially silenced. When Patch’s teenage daughter saw a distressing video of a horse trapped under tons of rubble, she noted, “That horse was probably in Gaza.” As readers, we are left with little doubt.

And we have no doubt when faced with angry, desperate descriptions of thousands of people killed in Gaza while seeking “help”: “Have you heard about the people lining up for food and the snipers shooting at them, and how the snipers who are doing that are not only shooting people randomly, but also playing a kind of shooting game? So some days they shoot people in the hands, some days they shoot people in the head?”

This quote continues, listing various other parts of the body; He stumbled over the words incredulously, terrified, breathless. Smith’s tonal skill as a writer is also put to great use when dealing with the bureaucracy and authoritarian absurdities of the British state. Patch’s daughter, who was supposedly keen for the government to do something other than write a strongly worded check in response to Israeli war crimes, was arrested for waving an “aggressive” scarf. Her mother was later informed that “waving a scarf is not in itself a specific criminal offense unless the waving of a particular scarf relates to a banned organisation… It was felt that the scarf which your daughter waved like a flag could be said to be tacit support for a newly banned organisation, and officers on the scene must now consider any gesture towards this new ban in that light.”

It is a bold move to be morally consistent, especially in the face of a perceived aesthetic orthodoxy that often favors distance and cynicism, but in Glyph we see a major British writer responding to the call of the day when so many others evade or turn away. There is also something about Smith’s relentless focus on language that makes her well suited to this task. As Orwell reminded us: “Political language…is designed to make lies seem true and murder respectable, to give an appearance of solidity to the pure wind.” Smith’s sensibility has been fine-tuned to deal with the torrent of negative headlines, asymmetric ratings, outright linguistic inversions and semantic absurdities that have accompanied increasingly desperate attempts to justify the inexcusable.

The Glyph is described as “homely” relative to its predecessor, the Gliff, and is primarily associated with mood and harmonious sound. It is typical of Smith that from the title onwards, we are drawn to the playful embellishments and puns, only for the heart of the matter to be revealed to us once we have fully engaged with the language itself. Gliff, a Scottish slang word meaning to glance, or suddenly be startled, sits alongside Glyph, which means to carve, mark, or engrave. So, from the beginning, we have no doubt: we have moved from the ephemeral to the permanent, from the fleeting image to the indelible inscription. We have moved from observers to witnesses. No matter how dark, we cannot say we did not see.