Poor Things, by its own admission, is a sort of Frankenstein come Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner with a heavy dose of femme, gender theory, and surgical dissection of modern medical practises thrown in for good measure. Telling the story of Victoria/Bell Baxter, a woman reborn (perhaps literally), and God(win), the man that may or not be her literal maker, this is a novel that asks you to cast a sharp eye over Victorian society and its inequalities that haunt the UK even to the present day. Is Bell honestly an empty adult woman's body with the living brain of a child? Or is this merely the way that McCandless, and the patriarchal Victorian society that bred him, choose to infantilise her? Is she the product of a selfish crazed medical establishment that will commit horrors for its own advancement? Or is the true horror of the doctor Godwin his refusal to accept the maltreatment of women and his attempts to save them? Presented as two conflicting narratives held together with the impartial wisdom of the editor, Alasdair Gray, this book will leave you with a million unanswerable questions. It's impossible to cleanly reconcile the two accounts, and to know what has occurred in the secretive nooks of Godwin Baxter's home. Certain final admissions of narrative inaccuracy will have you skimming the book anew, but always leaving you with more question's. It's a brilliant achievement, and a brilliant adventure.

Where this book also excels is in its fearless inversion of certain gendered tropes of fiction and otherwise. Bell Baxter's voracious sexual appetite robs Wedderburn, her partner in elopement, of his masculine value as well as his wealth, leaving him wishing to spend his remaining days in a monastery after giving up his pleas for marriage - a perfect inversion of the way in which loss of virginity and potential pregnancy robbed a woman of her female value and dowry, and left many a ruined woman rotting in nunneries after their male partners refused to marry them. Here, it's just funny. So too Gray literalises the strangeness of the Victorian male belief that women were simultaneously childish and uncontrollable crazed sexed beings, as well as exposing the horrible fact that men in this novel are attracted to what they think of as childish. Parts of this book will make you shudder. But it'll also make you laugh, because Bell Baxter is absolutely not a weak female heroine. In both narratives after a bit of a false start, however you choose to understand the mystery of her origins, she demolishes man after man, hilariously and believably.

Even removed from his usual Glasgow realism, Gray's social commentary is as biting as usual. Pointing out the ridiculous gender biases of Victorian, and contemporary, medicine: 'If every Scottish, Welsh and English doctor and surgeon dropped suddenly dead, eighty per cent of those admitted to our hospitals would recover if the nursing continues', and covering at some point most instances of inequality in UK society (his dissection of Punch magazine is particularly powerful: 'The pictures showed many kinds of people. The ugliest and most comical are Scots, Irish, foreign, poor, servants, rich folk who have been poor until very recently, small men, old unmarried women and Socialists', this is the least ambiguous and, strikingly, the most monstrous exposure in the book (even if you believe McCandless' theories of Bell's origins). To an innocent brain, these ideas are so abhorrent that they really do call the reader to question everything system we live under.