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Where Three Roads Meet

Old wine in new skins

Salley Vickers
Canongate, 195pp, £12.99,

Molly Guinness

Wednesday, 31st October 2007

Molly Guinness

The difficulty is that this cannot be a plot-driven tale, or rather, only at second hand; there is no climactic explanation for Tiresias’ visit to Sigmund Freud; they just could have had an interesting conversation if they’d met. But it isn’t interesting. Each character is lightly sketched and we are not really encouraged to care much about the seer or the neurologist; there is scope for amusement in the chasm between their explanations of various phenomena, but not much. Salley Vickers is asking us to become engrossed by a lengthened version of a story we already know, and it’s not easy.

Ali Smith achieves something more imaginative; the myth of Iphis and Ianthe is used as an inspirational story which binds two girls together in a lesbian romance. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Iphis was a girl brought up as a boy and transformed by Isis into a man just in time to marry Ianthe. In Ali Smith’s modern counterpart, Anthea falls in love with a girl called Robin who writes idealistic graffiti about women’s rights and capitalism. Together they step up the campaign and Imogen, Anthea’s sister, comes to terms with lesbianism and radicalism. It is a clever use of the myth, and Ali Smith has delivered another exuberant cascade of words; the romance is described in a lyrical flood and Imogen’s part is dealt with mainly in accomplished streams of consciousness. The heterosexual romance that appears as a subplot is delineated with psychological acumen; the interest of the homosexual one is rather a type of sub-poetic torrent describing mutual bliss — two pages are taken up by synonyms for marriage. It is a creditable addition to our lesbian corpus, but perhaps suffers from having too many messages.

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