More than 60 years ago, the post-Marxist art critic Harold Rosenberg wrote that history’s inherent irony was that “it changes men into themselves by making them seem something else”. So too in this case Smith’s characters are wilfully redemptive animations borne from her observance of a society falling apart. As Rose continues to pursue the defiant dells of freedom we chart Briar through his eventual submission to “verification”, aka: trackable drone citizenship, in a sci-fi style workplace which cannot but help nod to where Huxley and Orwell left off. Here Smith takes the opportunity to remind us of what data cannot entrain. For it’s not only data that is an imposter for reality, it is also data’s ancestor, language, the tool of the novelist.
As we are made to reflect on how animals such as the horse, or the family dog, exist outside any name that humans may concoct for them, Nietzsche’s emblematic catastrophe seeps back into the mind. “So there was the word that made the name,” Briar thinks, “and there was the dog that it conjured in the mind, and there, beyond it, totally free of it himself, was the real dog, wagging or not wagging its tail.” The hopeful implication here is that we too, as animals, still exist outside the data.
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Another of Rosenberg’s maxims was that “at the bottom of every situation lies the poetry of its ultimate wreck”. This seems as good a summary as any of what Smith’s books are best at depicting. Sure, the concocted dystopian state architecture in Gliff is apt and intertextual, but the more memorable aspects of the novel lie in the neo-folk transcendence that Rose, in particular, embodies.
Her insouciance feels a little like Smith’s approach to the novel itself, where the key traction always lies as much with the thrilling air of improvisation as it does with any obvious sense of “what happens next”. The fact is, in Smith’s fiction, what’s next has always been sistered by yesterday. We follow Briar and Rose not because they are heroes destined for triumph or failure but because we can relate to them. Yes, we too are riding a dangerous wave.
