Girl Meets Boy

Ali Smith's work has been a bit of a mixed bag for me, but I enjoyed Girl Meets Boy. Parts of it are quite brilliant and other sections not so good, but as a whole it was well done, I thought. It is also commendably concise, packing a lot into relatively few pages.

Smith takes Ovid's myth of Iphis and re-sets it in 2007 in Inverness. She uses the structure to write beautifully about sexual identity and attitudes toward it, the role and treatment of women in the world, and about the behaviour of global corporations. In the eleven years since its original publication it has dated a bit and some of the points she makes, while still shockingly valid today, seem rather laboured and heavy-handed. At its best, though, this is a thrilling and sometimes disturbing read; for example, there is a sex scene which contains almost nothing explicitly sexual but is astonishingly powerful and evocative, and the scene in the pub where two boorish, "laddish" men offhandedly and unthinkingly demean the young woman with them is chillingly recognisable.

Ali Smith can sometimes lose me by going over the top with her flights of fantastical prose, however brilliantly written, and that did happen a couple of times in Girl Meets Boy. Also, at times it seemed rather like one of Richard Curtis's more sentimentally message-hammering scripts, but none of that spoiled the book for me and I can recommend it.

(My thanks to Canongate for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Originally published in 2007 as part of the Canongate Myths series, Ali Smith’s ‘Girl Meets Boy’ gets a shiny new cover in this timely republication.

Fans of Ali Smith will (re)discover her exuberant, effervescent word play, a love of language and the complexities of meaning in a simple phrase as it is repeated, extended, and toyed with. A re-telling of the story of Iphis in Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ this is a story of love, sexuality and homophobia, big business and acts of guerrilla vandalism. It is short – short enough to read in one sitting, and if you haven’t read any Ali Smith before this is an excellent starter to her fictional world and her authorial voice. I’m of a certain age, slightly younger than Smith but old enough to get her references, and her humour and delicate observation are a joy to read. In a time and a world when bad news is all around us we need books like this to reaffirm our humanity and our potential. The rewriting of myths for a modern age is important; as one of the characters puts it: ‘It’s what we do with the myths we grow up with that matters’.

I admit to being a huge fan of Ali Smith and pretty much everything she does. This is a joyful, playful book that will, I hope, bring a smile to your face. I definitely recommend it.

I wasn't familiar with the Ovid tale that provides the inspiration for this book, and I wonder if, had I read that first, I'd have enjoyed it more? There were aspects that I loved - the different voices of the two sisters, and Midge's transformation from nervous parentheses to growing confidence, the comedy of the Pure board meeting and the horror of Pure's cynical commercialism. As I read, I felt that the story was on the slight side, and wasn't instantly enjoyable. However, I'm finding that, having finished it, it's something that I will ponder on, with images that will live in the memory.

What a talented writer Ali Smith is. I adore her work and have read most of her novels but somehow this one slipped past me. How glad I am that Canongate are reissuing it now and have given me the opportunity to read it via NetGalley.

Created in 2007 as part of the Canongate series of myths retold, this is a modern take on Ovid’s gender-shifting story of Iphis and Ianthe. It is great fun, combining the author’s trademark wordplay and exuberant wit with serious moral and cultural issues (principally the ‘privatisation’ of water supplies and women’s experiences in the workplace, both of which are, to my mind, still as relevant now as ten years ago).

One passage that struck me particularly:

‘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 ship 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 looked really like a girl.
She was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life.’

I can’t think of anything I didn’t like about it, except it was all over too quickly. Not to be missed.