Smith’s piece asks us again and again what a human right truly is.
pp.161
Publisher: Canongate, 2007
As part of the Canongate Myths series, Girl Meets Boy is a modern retelling of the myth of Iphis, one of
Ovid’s ‘cheeriest metamorphoses … one of the most happily resolved of its
stories about the desire for and the ramifications of change’. Girl Meets Boy is a novella which blurs
gender, sexuality and identity to form a humanistic narrative on love and what
it means to be human.
Smith’s contemporary metamorphosis concerns Anthea and her
sister, Imogen, as they each react to the exploitative and inhumane company
that they work for. ‘Pure’ is a distributor of bottled water, greedily
exploring marketing strategies and exploiting areas of poorer countries by
blocking their access to fresh water. Smith’s piece asks us again and again what a human right truly is,
despite racial differences, despite gender differences, despite differences in
sexuality.
Alongside, and indeed informing, this part of the narrative
is Anthea’s love affair with a female human rights activist. When Imogen finds
out that her sister is gay (a word ‘worse than the word cancer’), her inner
monologue as she comes to terms with this fact is funny and shocking. She tries
desperately to overcome a homophobia deeply embedded within her consciousness
by the social norms of the time. She considers moving house because the
neighbours might know. The oblivious gay jokes that Imogen suffers at the pub
from her friends Dominic and Norman turn her on the defensive, and from there
we can see that she is sympathetic after all. This contributes to Imogen’s
social awakening at the end of the book, where she becomes aware of the
corruption that surrounds her.
Ali reworks this myth intricately and bravely, tackling very
modern concerns with her succinct and compulsive writing. Whiz through this
short book and enjoy an intelligent literary mind at work, as it weaves our
contemporary concerns into a classical narrative.
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