Myth duster
Ali
Smith is a writer who tends to polarise opinion. Her last novel,
The Accidental, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
in 2005, but I didn’t meet anyone else who liked it. I wasn’t
sure I did myself to begin with, and part of my liking for it
is probably a defensive reaction against violent criticism of
what is, at the very least, an interesting and ambitious work
that deserves credit for that. Her earlier novel Hotel World
was no more conventional, a collection of stream-of-consciousness
voices which angered one Amazon reader for not being a sufficiently
accurate representation of life in a hotel; which is a little
like the Victoria Wood character who didn’t like Fawlty
Towers because it was supposed to be set in Torquay, but “could
have been anywhere, frankly.”
For her next trick then, Smith has written Girl Meets Boy,
a novella in the Canongate Myths series. The story she has chosen
to update (or “remix” according to the blurb) is the
story of Iphis from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I haven’t
read Ovid since school and I don’t think I got as far as
Iphis in Ted Hughes’ celebrated interpretation of the tales,
so fortunately Smith gives us a primer midway through, though
a sneak preview - if that’s the word for a story written
two thousand years ago - is available here.
It’s about what tabloids would once have called
gender-bending, and so the title not only recalls classic love
stories, but has another primary meaning in the character of Robin,
who is neither and both: girl-meets-boy. The story is narrated
by two sisters, Anthea and Imogen (’Midge’). Anthea
falls in love with Robin who is protesting against Pure, the water
company she works for.
My head, something happened to its insides.
It was as if a storm at sea happened, but only for a moment,
and only on the inside of my head. My ribcage, something definitely
happened there. It was as if it unknotted itself from itself,
like the hull of a hip hitting rock, giving way, and the ship
that I was opened wide inside me and in came the ocean.
He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen
in my life.
But he really looked like a girl.
She was the most beautiful boy I had ever
seen in my life.
This leads Midge to worry, in a parenthetic stream
of consciousness, that “(Oh my God my sister is a GAY.)
(I am not upset. I am not upset. I am not upset. I am not upset.)”
She has to field awkward questions from her unreconstructed friends,
Norman and Dominic, two-dimensional homophobic lads. Not that
this sets them apart from other elements of the book. Politically
Smith seems to feel that every reader has the right not to be
confused by shades of grey, and so we have the capitalist-bastard
water company executive -
Small body of irate ethnics in one of our
Indian sub-interests factioning against our planned filter-dam
two-thirds completed and soon to power four Pure labs in the
area. They say: our dam blocks their access to fresh water and
ruins their crops. We say: they’re ethnic troublemakers
who are trying to involve us in a despicable religious war.
Use the word terrorism if necessary. Got it?
- and Robin herself is an anarchic ‘breath
of fresh air’/'pain in the arse’ akin to Amber from
The Accidental, addressing well-worn issues through spray-painting
statistics about male-female inequality in public places. All
this reminded me of the critic who accused Martin Amis of dealing
in “banalities delivered with tremendous force,” which
attack Amis sought to de-barb by adopting it as his own credo
(”that’s fine by me”). Smith’s issues
are not subtle, and little is left under the surface, but there
is something nonetheless loving about the way she presents it.
She is at her best when returning from the political
to the personal, and the descriptions of love and sex in Girl
Meets Boy are poetic and invigorating, and the opening pages
of the final section, incorporating literary nods and winks (”Ness
I said Ness I will Ness”), humorous contemporary references
(”A male-voice choir from the Inverness Police Force sang
a beautiful arrangement of songs from Gilbert and Sullivan. Then
the Inverness Constabulary female-voice choir sang an equally
beautiful choral arrangement of Don’t Cha (Wish Your Girlfriend
Was Hot Like Me)”), and a litany of free-association -
…we got married. I mean we here came
the bride. I mean we walked down the aisle. I mean we step we
gailied, on we went, we Mendelssohned, we epithalamioned, we
raised high the roofbeams, carpenters, for there was no other
bride, o bridegroom, like her. We crowned each other with the
garlands of flowers. We stamped on the wine-glasses wrapped
in the linen. We jumped the broomsticks. We lit the candles.
We crossed the sticks.
- that is sure to become a source for readings at
weddings and partnership ceremonies in years to come.
Smith also wastes no opportunities to reflect her
themes of sexuality and equality, and the motifs of the original
myth, everywhere she can in her story, so the whole has a pleasing
completeness to it. She even finds time to bring back the topic
of myths themselves and the “responsibility” of creating
a myth. It’s a story which revels in being light-hearted
and serious-minded at the same time, and for the most part manages
to pull it off by force of charm alone.
John Self
To read more of John Self's book reviews, check
out his blog at
The Asylum.
