With the year of the horse in full thrust, Ali Smith’s newest novel Glyph, about a mysterious white horse turning up in someone’s living room, seems pretty timely. But, if you ask me, it is quite the opposite!

Glyph follows on from Gliff, Smith’s previous novel about another horse: the companion to siblings Briar and Rose. The children, classed as “unverifiables” and forced to navigate life alone in a dystopian universe, are comforted by the presence of their new pet. They name it “Gliff”, meaning “a short moment” or simply “a substitute word of any word.” In the slipperiness of its name, also “a misspelling for Glyph”, the horse reflects what is at stake in the novel: the precarity of past and present. Now the horse rears its head once again in Glyph, this time a blind horse from WW2; Smith reminds us that stories never truly end if we just keep on telling them…

“Smith spends the whole of Glyph referencing and retelling what she has already written once before”

In her recent talk at the Cambridge Literary Festival – a bi-annual event hosting poets, scientists and authors across Cambridge – Smith used precisely this concept of “telling” as an anchor. She confronted the questions, “Why Glyph? Why now?”: in answering them she explained that she was trying to “explode” the distinction between sequel and prequel. Holding the two books up next to each other, she described Glyph and Gliff as companion pieces and argued that “stories can be used to understand each other.” In Glyph, she committed to this mandate wholeheartedly, with even her characters having read Gliff! So, Smith spends the whole of the novel referencing and retelling what she has already written once before.

The two siblings in Glyph, Petra and Patricia, serve as an inverted mirror image of Gliff’s Briar and Rose: unlike them, they are estranged from each other, forced to navigate a fragmented world of AI and a war in Gaza entirely alone. It is only the presence of Patricia’s daughter, Bill – a sarky teenager with a self-proclaimed interest in “the way we all use language” – that brings the two back together. What’s more, it is only the presence of Bill that makes the novel interesting. In Bill, Smith finds hope for the future generation in the ways we might find to communicate with one another.

“Smith observes difficulty but doesn’t offer the reader an easy answer to it”

Where Bill’s family is preoccupied with the events of the past – rehashing a traumatic story about a man in World War II flattened by a tank – Bill is quick-witted and constantly present in the moment. A much-needed breath of fresh air, Bill provides the novel an element of comic relief through her penchant for word-play: “To mean or not to mean. I mean, that’s the question.” But also, like the best jester, she talks the most sense: Bill wonders about the “inhumanizing stuff” that is “happening […] in countries where people still believe they can be totally unaffected by any of the wars that are currently happening.”

But, in recycling the already-written narrative of Gliff, Smith merely alienates her readers from what is currently happening. Where in Gliff the plight of the siblings felt revelatory – exposing the dark underbelly of politics and technology – in reading Glyph, I just found myself jaded by the ongoing struggle to create change in a broken world. The final nail in the coffin came at the end of the book when the family are watching a news programme on TV: they see protest footage of individuals carrying placards with “broad red lines and the word England backwards,” an obvious allusion to the Reform party. But, like many other political statements in Glyph, the allusion is not elaborated on. Smith observes difficulty but doesn’t offer the reader an easy answer to it… or really any answer at all!

“Lamenting the loss of the £16 I paid […] I couldn’t help but feel that Smith needs some new material!”

The novel closes with the open-ended questions, “how would you like it to end? How do you imagine it will? ,” and yet again, we must suffer an underwhelming ambiguity when what we really want are answers. Turning over that final page, I found myself wishing there was another chapter, not because I was particularly gripped by the novel but because I was looking for something more. Lamenting the loss of the £16 I paid for a book that was neither a page-turner nor a brain-scratcher, I couldn’t help but feel that Smith needs some new material! My disappointment was somewhat relieved when I noticed a painting printed inside the back cover of Edvard Munch’s The Pathfinder. Depicting a man leading a horse through a forest, this print of The Pathfinder was a reminder to me that although all paths lead nowhere in Glyph, good art can unlock the reader’s imagination and allow them to invent original stories for themselves.

In her talk at the Cambridge Literary Festival, Smith revealed that she chose Munch’s painting to memorialise a story that should not be forgotten: the story between humanity and nature. Incidentally, Munch will also be the inspiration for her next project as she is writing a text to accompany an exhibition of his paintings at Muchmuseet in Oslo. Hopefully, this means Smith is finding new paths to follow and can finally quit flogging a dead horse!