‘Girl Meets Boy’ by Ali Smith

With a title like Girl Meets Boy, one might expect this novel, Ali Smith's fourth, to be a relatively straightforward heterosexual love story. Indeed, this is what I was expecting when I purchased the neat little volume around two or three weeks ago. But, as is often the case, my expectations were quite spectacularly off base, for, along with being a modern-day reinterpretation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book 9, it is also the story of love at first sight between one girl, Anthea, later known as Ianthe, and another girl, Robin, also known as Iphis. So, I have once again learned that it is best not to take titles too literally.

But what surprised me most about Girl Meets Boy was how much I delighted in reading it. At just over 160 pages in mercifully large type, the novella-length work could quite easily be read in one sitting - I read it in two, but only because I was interrupted during the first. Smith's modern-day retelling of Ovid's myth of Iphis, transported all the way from Ancient Greece to Inverness circa 2007, is enlightening and mellifluous; Smith combines contemporary issues and a free-flowing lyrical style with pleasing panache. The most remarkable sequence in Girl Meets Boy is without doubt the sex scene: it makes no direct reference to the human anatomy and yet it feels startlingly real.

This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in February 2012.