Two children decode a dystopia, in a chilling and wistful novel that speaks to our times
li Smith has never been afraid to take cleverness seriously. It is a distinctly European sensibility, yet its fullest vindication came amid the xenophobic pageantry of Brexit. The Seasonal Quartet was the work of an intellectual first responder, urgently cataloguing the treasures of pluralism as the body politic celebrated its sweaty fiesta of insularity. Not many novelists could have pulled that off.
In the Brexit novels, that crisis was necessarily specific, requiring a substrate of contemporary realism. This time, though, Smith grants herself more speculative licence, presenting us with a grim extrapolation of our current trajectory. As Gliff opens, two children huddle before a loading dock at the hotel where their mother works. With them is a man called Leif, who confers with the woman in terse snatches before leading the children away. There are microphones and cameras.
It is a skill they will come to depend on. Separated from Leif, they find a house to squat in. Rose, the younger of the two, turns inwards, becoming besotted with the horses that graze in a nearby field. She names her favourite Gliff, a Scottish word whose many meanings – among them glance, trace and inkling – take a page and a half to enumerate. Here they do duty as both in-joke and incantation, as one lost child reconstructs her own oral tradition.
Befriended by Oona, the elderly activist, Briar acquires a kindly instructor in revolutionary praxis. Drawing on Oona’s store of memories, they begin sifting the cultural wreckage and decoding their own past. For the children’s mother, we learn, tried to play both sides, a corporate shill turned whistle-blower. Picking apart the antique metaphor, Briar grasps what their mother didn’t: that the gesture was empty not because it made no difference but because truth-telling itself is now obsolete.
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