A commentary on the grim present: Glyph, by Ali Smith, reviewed
Glyph (whose sibling, Gliff, was published last year) is Ali Smith’s 14th novel and her fifth since 2016, when her ‘Seasonal Quartet’ saw the beginning of her project to use fiction to comment on contemporary events. It takes as its subject two sisters. Petra and Patricia (‘Patch’) negotiate their difficult childhood by retreating into a story world. Not that their escape is all unicorns and rainbows. The two stories they most often return to involve a horse blinded in the Great War and a man’s corpse flattened towards the end of the second world war. They call this flattened man ‘Glyph’: it’s ‘the sound he makes when he breathes out’.
