Girl Meets boy by Ali Smith

Where Three Roads Meet by Salley Vickers

Binu and The Great Wall by Su Tong

Canongate’s series The Myths, ancient stories retold by current writers, is one of the more interesting developments in British fiction publishing, and here come volumes VII, VIII and IX, respectively adapting Ovid, Sophocles and a Chinese folktale.

Ali Smith’s title is intentionally misleading. The lovers, Anthea and Robin, are both girls. Robin (equivalent to Iphis, the girl raised as a boy in Ovid) is boyish, though Smith derides conventional sex distinction: “She was as brave and handsome and rough as a girl. She was as pretty and delicate and dainty as a boy.” Hmm. Robin herself, discussing the Bond films, goes further and says, “Daniel Craig and Ursula Andress look remarkably alike, when you compare them.” Right .. .I have here a copy of Arena, with Craig on the cover, and a 1965 James Bond annual, open at a full-page photo of Andress. Nope. Nope. No resemblance whatever.

Despite Smith’s insistence on the meaninglessness of gender, it might not surprise you to know that men get it in the neck. A couple of oiks called Dominic and Norman taunt Anthea’s sister Imogen with crass jibes about “gregs”, after Greg Dyke. Imogen’s boss is a thug bent on world domination, who gets an erection as he plans a dam to deny Indian peasants their water supply. The only okay bloke, Imogen’s friend Paul, is okay just because he’s “quite female”.

The love idyll is more than a little fey and precious, with flights of icky purple prose and puns such as “Lo and be held, she said.” Gay life is compared to the “cornucopic” Hanging Gardens of Babylon, with straight people stuck inside “a tiny white-painted rectangle about the size of a single space in a car park, refusing to come out”. The old if-only-they-knew motif. But elsewhere the book has a saving lightness and humour.

Salley Vickers imagines the Greek seer Tiresias paying calls on the dying Sigmund Freud, stepping in through the french windows of the house in Hampstead to chat about the Oedipus business. Perhaps it is Freud’s morphine dream, but it seems natural, all told in dialogue like a radio play.

Supposedly, Tiresias spent seven years as a woman (more gender-bending), but he explains that as an apprentice at Delphi he was used like a girl by one of the older priests, that’s all it means. Vickers knows her Hellenic stuff, and she conjures the long-dried fount of western civilisation with eerie reality. Tiresias describes the daily routines at Delphi and remarks on the stiff fees levied for oracular advice. But then Freud charges fees, too. “An entirely different matter,” bridles Freud. “Psychoanalysis is an exact science. . . not a series of superstitious rituals designed to hoodwink the credulous.” The old boys make a high-tone double act. To Sophocles, the Oedipus story was about fate v free will;to these two it’s about the benefits and dangers of repression. Oedipus insisted on knowing “what he needed not to know”.

There are many sidelights, such as Freud’s recollection of walking with his grandson Heinz, who died young of TB. “I was holding little Heinz’s hand and he was squeezing it as he used to do, and digging his thumb into the palm of my hand,” a well-caught instance of the terrible particularity of grief. The novel is a bright, hard, fine-cut gem.

Su Tong, the author of Raise the Red Lantern – not, by the way, a woman – elaborates on the legend of Binu, whose husband is pressganged to work on the Great Wall. She treks north to take him a winter coat. Her journey is the story, episodic but not quite rising to the picaresque. For some reason, almost everyone she meets is angry and aggressive. She gets scolded, knocked down, tied up, dragged around like firewood and generally harassed wherever she goes.

It’s odd. The Chinese always sound irate to westerners (at the Wong Kei restaurant on Wardour Street, fear of a clip round the ear from the waiter is, famously, all part of the dining experience), but one assumed that was a cultural misunderstanding, like the Latins’ conviction that the British are “cold” because they can’t read our manner. The law of averages surely forbids the entire Chinese population to exist in a steaming great bate from cradle to grave. In Tong’s medieval China, though, that is pretty much the case. Is it like volatile Jacobean England, where everyone was permanently (a) suffering from toothache and (b) hogwhimpering drunk? Tong’s preface says the story is about class, meaning, no doubt, that the poor get a rough deal. But, despite his simple, classic style, the monotony is deadening.

GIRL MEETS BOY by Ali Smith
Canongate £12.99 pp164

WHERE THREE ROADS MEET by Salley Vickers
Canongate £12.99 pp199

BINU AND THE GREAT WALL by Su Tong
Canongate £14.99 pp291

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