Literary modernism meets your not-so-typical ghost story in Ali Smith’s Glyph. Battling against typical stream-of-consciousness techniques, Smith proves she can innovate in this new game of spirits. It begins with two stories of war from the 20th century and how, thirty years on, these tales haunt the lives of two sisters who heard them as children. Any fan of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce or Jack Kerouac will enjoy Smith’s assimilation of small factual details from history into a spectre for modern times.
Nightmares are both bad dreams and phantom horses for this work, which truly picks apart language in all its different forms. Glyph has a custom-built vocabulary; especially the title, which becomes both noun and verb for the ghost that the sisters create to make sense of their past, present and future. We encounter Duolingo, text-based speech, dialogue proper and even a lack of speech marks as fashioned by Sally Rooney. Smith seems confident in tackling traditional writing formats, plot-based structures and common phraseology but avoids churning out incomprehensible semiotic gloop. It’s a surprising recipe for thoughtful enjoyment if you want to pick up a book on any afternoon.
Every moment is considered both psychologically and literally. Chapters often begin with a wistful jerk backwards over the events of the last, playfully reworking sequences together into clever narrative turns that could be worthy of nonsense writing. Smith surely must be employing her wide range of life experience from dropping out of a doctorate, working as a waitress and teaching at Cambridge. This makes the novel more refreshing, interested and relevant. At its centre, even with all the clever interpretation of ghosts, it is the sisterly relationship that remains paramount. It’s a hieroglyph for the times we find ourselves in currently and it can regularly be found questioning, battling or considering how alienated from each other we really are.
Glyph not only asks the reader to consider if ghosts exist, but interrogates why and how they are created. What societal, economic and political structures act upon the mind to force someone to imagine a horse terrorizing their bedroom? Do we need phantoms to absolve our own behaviours when it is in fact us who trashed the room? Smith handles these questions with care, compassion and unhesitating determination to argue for every possible side.
Words by Harry Speirs
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