The dystopian fiction of imperialism, which began with Jack London’s Iron Heel, has returned with a vengeance in the 2020s, increasingly recognised in international literary awards. From Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song (2023 Booker Prize) to Ali Smith’s Gliff (2026 Dublin Literary Award), novelists imagine futures that feel uncomfortably close to the present.
Yet where Lynch’s resistance is clandestine and itself sinister, Smith builds fightback into the very structure of Gliff. Through a mother figure, two embedded parables, the horse named Gliff, the act of naming, and a final shift to second-person narration, Smith argues that defiance is a persistent, improvised salving: tending wounds, remembering the erased, and walking north toward the unverifiable. The novel’s central political category is the “unverifiable”: those stripped of digital identity for speaking truth to power. The horse Gliff transports the memory of what is deeply humane in a world where the system, and its enforcers, have become inhuman. Significantly, the grassroots Dublin Literary Award, representing readers’ choice, signals resonance—and Gliff earns this recognition because it refuses to let readers remain spectators.
The state in Gliff renders people “unverifiable”, subjecting them to detention, torture, and “re-education” in ARCs (Adult Retraining Centres) and CRCs (Child Retraining Centres). The reasons for becoming unverifiable ring frighteningly familiar:
“They were largely unverifiable because of words. 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.”
To be declared unverifiable is punishment for truth-telling. The mother, who haunts the novel, is its hidden point of origin: a whistleblower whose story the children carry like a wound. She worked for Kindweed, a corporation whose benign name masks toxic reality; she exposed the truth, was sacked, taken to court, and confined to a red line painted around the family home. Her philosophy—”We can’t solve it, but we can salve it”—becomes the novel’s governing ethos. She suddenly disappears and her values become the children’s moral compass.
Two parables provide a mythic framework, reinforcing both the necessity and long history of resistance. One story tells of a horse-headed child who hears the unsaid, is declared unverifiable and taken. Her mother remembers. All abused things rise as a grey mountain of clamour. The second parable concerns a tyrant who kills his opponent, burns the body, flushes the ash away, and even sends it into space. Yet the ash becomes the air, the water, the universe. Together, the parables insist that resistance is not futile but the only possible response to a world built on erasure.
The horse Gliff operates on multiple levels: prehistoric, living, and literary. The prehistoric horse carving from Derbyshire’s Robin Hood Cave is shown to the children by their mother. This encounter prepares them for the living horse, destined for the abattoir, that Rose names “Gliff”—a Scottish and northern English word that can be used for any word. The horse steps over the red line without hesitation, and accompanies the children on their way north.
On a literary level, Smith evokes Swift’s Houyhnhnms from Gulliver’s Travels, embodying gentleness and truthfulness. Briar is captured, Rose brings Gliff north, returning the care it has received and embodying the twelve-thousand-year-old relationship between humans and animals celebrated by both prehistoric art and the novel itself.
Briar’s arc traces a difficult path from resistance to enforced complicity and finally redemption across two timelines: childhood and five years later, after capture and “re-education”, when Briar has become “Mr Allendale”, a Packing Belt Superior forced into a male identity. The turning point comes when an injured worker, Ayesha Falcon, recognises Briar and tells her the story of the cave where Rose had lived and helped “ferals”. Confronted with Ayesha’s fate and story, Briar recognises her betrayal.
Briar’s redemption is hard-won, but the final pages belong to Rose, the novel’s radical antagonist, who remains unverifiable to the end. She anchors the novel’s moral vision because she never becomes complicit.
North carries profound significance throughout Gliff: the mother’s trip, the cave art representing twelve thousand years of human-animal relation, the unverifiable, and the direction of escape from the surveillance state. For a Scottish writer like Smith, north expands into rebel territory.
After Briar’s first-person narration dominates most of the novel, the final pages switch to second person: “You are a girl on a horse.” The reader becomes Rose. Resistance is no longer observed but enacted. The ending remains open: Rose, Colon, and Gliff walk north; Briar follows later. “We’ll be making it up as we go” refuses closure. There is no guaranteed victory, only an improvisational, collective future defined by what it is not: not authoritarianism, not surveillance, not the red line.
In Gliff, Ali Smith identifies some sinister aspects of contemporary society—surveillance, data extraction, hostility toward refugees and truth-tellers, corporate and establishment impunity—and offers an image of resistance: a horse, a boy, led by a girl with a stone in her pocket from her demolished home, going north. Gliff stands as one of the most significant dystopian novels of the 2020s—not because it predicts a future, but because it shows us how to live in the one already here.
