Queerview: Ali Smith

In May, 2006,Canongate Books started publishing a series of books by leading contemporary writers retelling classic myths. The most recent addition to the series is Girl Meets Boy– the relling of the myth of Iphis from Ovid’s Metamorphosis– by Ali Smith.

The story begins when the narrator’s Granfather, who had been a circus performer, tells her stories of when he was a girl. After the stories, the family plays an unusual game called Blind Date where a boy picks from three girls and a girl picks from three boys as they are seperated by a screen and a character named Cilla Black:

“But which is Cilla Black, then, boy or girl? She doesn’t seem to be either. She can look at the boys if she wants; she can look at the girls. She can go between the two sides of things like a magician, or a joke.”

The players hope the Blind Date will work out and that there will be a wedding, “which is what it’s called before people get divorced,” the narrator– Anthea– tells us.

Anthea– a “Creative” at an advertising agency called Pure–compares herself and her life to the Internet, “full of every kind of information and none of it mattering more than any of it.”

At the end of her first– and last–day at Pure she meets a graffitti artist named IPHISOL, who has been protesting Pure by spray painting on their billboard advertisements:

“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.”

As it turns out, IPHISOL is Robin Goodman, a former classmate of Anthea’s sister, Midge. When Midge sees Anthea and Robin kissing, she must face the disturbing fact that her sister is a lesbian:

“My sister would be banned in schools if she was a book.”

Midge is embarrassed by her sister and does not mention her to her homophobic colleagues; but having listened to them as they berate lesbians, Midge concludes:

(“Oh my God my sister who is related to me is a greg, a lack, unfuckable, not properly developed, and not even worth making illegal”)

It is Anthea’s lover, Robin, who tells her the myth of Iphis: Iphis is born a girl but is raised as a boy to save her life. She/he is betrothed and set to marry, but is distraught because she fears that on her wedding night her secret will be revealed. Her mother goes to the temple and prays to the goddess. The next day, when Iphis wakes, she finds, of course, that she has become a boy.

Anthea’s sister– after losing her job at Pure and returning home to find her sister and her sister’s lover in jail for protesting Pure– finally sees the light (in more ways than one) and girl meets boy (in more ways than one) and in the end, reader, Anthea marries him/her.

Other books in the Canongate Myths series include:
By Jeanette Winterson:

By Margaret Atwood:

By Karen Armstrong:

By Victor Pelevin:

~ by erc2008 on May 12, 2008.