Rating: 4/5
Review:
A good re-telling
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.
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