booklit

When the first books from the Canongate Myths series were launched, I wasn’t too enamoured with the choices of Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Atwood, two authors that I’d read in some capacity and never truly enjoyed. Perhaps in expecting to dislike the books there could have been no outcome other than to dislike, which was what happened. And now, coming back to the series I found myself facing off against Ali Smith, yet another whose work I’ve sampled and found not for me. So, imagine my surprise when, expecting to dislike Girl Meets Boy (2007), I found there could be another outcome.

Like all other books in the Myths Series, Girl Meets Boy takes on the challenge of selecting a well known myth and, putting the author’s spin on it, updating it. Smith’s choice is that of Iphis from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, the only story we are told that, thanks to a helpful idiot’s guide halfway through, has - if, like me, you didn’t know - a happy ending.

Girl Meets Boy’s first line (”Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says.”)  sets out its stall in foreshadowing that there’s some loose gender definitions here. This line is recalled by Anthea, who, along with her sister Imogen, narrate the story. Anthea is the younger of the two, looked after by Imogen in a house in Inverness, left to them by their grandparents. Imogen has even gone so far as to get her sister a job at Pure, a creative consultancy charged with creating a slogan for water, where water represents the imagination:

Water is history. Water is mystery. Water is nature. Water is life. Water is archaeology. Water is civilisation. Water is where we live. Water is here and water is now. Get the message. Get it in a bottle.

This is the cry of Keith, the sisters’ knuckle-dragging boss whose opinions belong in an age darker than the projection room he’s addressing. Anthea, however, isn’t one to bottle the imagination, as her walk to work that day illustrated:

I could, if I chose, just walk to the river. I could stand up and let myself fall the whole slant of the bank. I could just let the fast old river have me, toss myself in like a stone.

Not one to go with the flow, Anthea is quick to rebel from this corporate life when she spots a boy from the window painting a slogan about water being a human right

He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life.

But he looked like a girl.

She was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life.

The boy is indeed a girl, and Anthea finds herself romantically involved, much to the chagrin of her sister who, in her narrative sections, is constantly interrupted by her inner thoughts, conclealed in brackets:

(Oh my God my sister is A GAY.)

(I am not upset. I am not upset. I am not upset. I am not upset.)

The blame falls on their parents’ break up and the Spice Girls with Imogen comically gathering up all the clues that she should have noticed, such as liking the Eurovision Song Contest and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. And it’s this attitude that Smith takes on in her retelling of Iphus’ story, that in a time when single-sex relationships are accepted, it’s the attitude toward them that needs to change. Smith opts for chapter headings called ‘I’, ‘You’, ‘Us’, ‘Them’ and ‘All Together Now’ that ensure, in a book of reversals, that the happy ending remains unchanged.

While the slogans, thanks to their creative background, the girls go on to daub across the city seem like slapped on feminism, Smith’s prose throughout the book has a lightness to it that makes reading it a breeze, especially at its most playful, and when communicating its message of love:

She had the swagger of a girl. She blushed like a boy. She had a girl’s toughness. She had a boy’s gentleness. She was as meaty as a girl. She was as graceful as a boy. She was as brave and handsome and rough as a girl. She was as pretty and delicate and dainty as a boy. She turned boys’ heads like a girl. She turned girls’ heads like a boy. She made love like a boy. She made love like a girl. She was so boyish it was girlish, so girlish it was boyish, she made me want to rove the world writing our names on every tree.

And for a book that has fun written all over it, in literary allusions and puns aplenty, it proved to have one more reversal up its sleeve. Reader, I liked it.

“Life, I do not understand you”, writes Doctor Tyko Gabriel Glas in his diary as events draw to a close in Hjalmar Söderberg’s classic eponymous novel, Doctor Glas (1905), and it sums up all of his frustrations at his understanding of the world around him and at the life shattering realisation that life has passed him by. Of course, if it has passed then it has been his own doing, and how things have come to be so make the reading of his diary a rich and rewarding experience, even if it breaches (albeit in reverse) the whole doctors and confidentiality thing.

Set in Stockholm over an unusually hot summer, the likes of which he has never known, the thirty-something Doctor Glas tends to his patients by day and scribbles away in his diary at night. The entries are wide ranging, covering his day to day duties, his encounters with people in his wider circle, and his deeper reflections on the nature of the world and of himself.

One of the first questions he asks himself is one of the more unusual ones:

How can it have come about that, out of all possible trades, I should have chosen the one which suits me least?

For a doctor, he has a strange understanding of life. He shuns something as natural as sex, disgusted by how filthy it sounds (”why must the life of our species be preserved and our longing stilled by means of an organ we use several times a day to drain impurities?”) and spurns any attention shown to him, despite admitting that “I’m alone and the moon is shining, and I long for a woman”. One women, it is mentioned, has even made her interest known, but he can’t remember her mouth, and “one is only really familiar with a mouth one has kissed, or longed very much to kiss.”

One such mouth, however, belongs to Helga, (”whose heart was full of desire and misery”), the young wife of the “loathsome” Reverend Gregorius. She comes to his surgery one day, not through illness, but to ask of him a favour, saying that she is tired of her husband taking his rights in the bedroom and could he please say that she has an infection of the womb in order to deter him, even admitting that she has another lover. Whatever efforts Glas makes, however, helps only temporarily and Gregorius returns to old ways, effectively raping his wife.

All other options exhausted, Doctor Glas wrestles in his mind over the notion of murder, wondering whether removing Gregorius from the picture is the right decision. “Morality, that’s others’ views of what is right,” he tells himself:

Morality becomes consciously for me what it is in practice for each and every person, although all do not recognise it: not a fixed law, binding above all, but a modus vivendi, useful for daily life in that unremitting state of war which exists between oneself and the world.

And so he takes to wandering around with a small number of cyanide pills he had originally fashioned for himself, back in the days when he had contemplated suicide. Indeed, if his plan were not to go well he realised he must still consider that option.

While the novel’s surface expertly handles a twisted love triangle, it is the novel’s attitudes to such themes as abortion, euthanasia, and women’s right’s that make it a particular stand out. For a novel written over a hundred years ago, its ideas are incredibly prescient:

The day will come, must come, when the right to die is recognised as far more important and inalienable a human right than the right to drop a voting ticket into a ballot box. And when that time is ripe, every incurable sick person – and every ‘criminal’ also – shall have the right to the doctor’s help, if he wishes to be set free.

What makes these themes more interesting, in light of the narrative, is that the presentation is never didactic. Glas doesn’t so much believe in women’s rights as act in his own interestes towards the reverend’s wife. He refuses the women who come to him begging abortions, as his duties don’t allow it, although he does sympathise, especially on coming face to face with the product of one such opportunity.

Söderberg has done a brilliant job of making Glas a man of contrasts, his suggestive name hinting at his transparency, no matter what he himself sees. At times a seemingly generous soul, willing to help, his psyche goes deeper, darker, and into selfish realms. And no matter how much he may deceive himself, he still provides an understanding of the world and people:

We want to be loved; failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. Our soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.

Coming to the conclusion of Doctor Glas, and longing for the winter after the summer, it’s no wonder that Glas does not understand life. Indeed, he writes, “Life is action, When I see something that makes me indignant, I want to intervene.” but he can do nothing to intervene in his own circumstances.

Remarkably modern, Doctor Glas provides a fantastic slice of the gothic in a narrative that is, by turns, invigorating and horrific, and told with such succinctness that begs the question of why many modern novels contain so much fluff. It’s dark, refreshing, and completely enjoyable; as fiction goes, it’s just what the doctor ordered.