I realize that the film version of Poor Things is highly acclaimed, but I started watching it not long ago and I couldn’t get into it. I didn’t like the grainy black and white photography. It would be different if it was clear and sharp, but it wasn’t. I knew that after a certain point it was supposed to switch to color, but after about fifteen or twenty minutes I got fed up and stopped watching.

The novel, though, gripped me immediately. The story concerns a woman, Bella, who is almost nine months pregnant. She has a horrific home life, and after a particularly nasty incident, she jumps off a bridge into a river and drowns. A scientist named Godwin Baxter revives her by transferring to her the brain of her unborn baby. She then has to learn mobility and the ability to speak all over again.

The story is told through several viewpoints, each of which casts a different perspective on the events. The first section is by Archibald McCandless, a medical student and acquaintance of Baxter, who proposes to Bella soon after meeting her. She accepts, but before they can get married, she elopes with another man, Duncan Wedderburn; however, she refuses to marry him, claiming that she is already the fiancé of McCandless. This does not prevent her from having lots of sex with Wedderburn as she observes him succumbing to severe gambling addiction and effectively losing his fortune as they travel around Europe. The second perspective is Wedderburn’s, who blames Bella for his bad fortune; upon his return to Europe he is committed to a lunatic asylum. There is then a series of letters from Bella, which she sends to Baxter and McCandless as she travels around with Wedderburn; needless to say, her take on what happens is very different from Wedderburn’s. Along the way, she consorts with some English so-called gentlemen who attempt to educate her in the logic of empire and of the British class system.

When Bella returns to England, the husband she had run away from, a British admiral, shows up and attempts to claim her. During the course of his argument with Baxter and McCandless, Bella comes to realize, albeit abstractly, some details about her past. She eventually rejects the admiral, marries McCandless, and becomes one of very few woman doctors in England. McCandless finishes his narration, and this is followed by a letter Bella writes to her children and grandchildren after Baxter and McCandless have died in which she refutes much of the facts as McCandless has presented them. Finally, at the end, the author Alasdair Gray presents a series of “notes critical and historical” that add all sorts of interesting trivia (most of it fabricated) to the events in the book.

Besides the idiosyncratic text, Gray has illustrated it with sketches of some of the main characters and images of human body fragments from the famous reference work Gray’s Anatomy. Poor Things is altogether a brilliantly original novel full of insight into the foibles of the time, including the snobbish British sense of superiority that led to the conquering of poorer nations during the era of the British Empire, the distain the British aristocracy felt for commoners, and the subservient role of women in the society of the time. It is intense and intelligent and funny and highly entertaining. In fact, it is so good that I might go back and give the movie another chance, so I can compare it with this masterpiece of comedic satire.