Scitha, man-horse, deep-water Kraken, Monster-flower” – Jack becomes more confident. And as she finds other names for him – “Daemon.
Jack feels recognised for the first time when Bess instinctively calls him “Something” – “his secret Word for what was behind the door in himself that he could not open”. No one could call this novel underwritten.īut the pyrotechnics signify less than the true nub of the story, which is a subdued and hard-won account of how it feels to change gender. The children of a passing aristocrat are described as “too-handsomely attired, orbiting him like Expressionless gas-filled balloons”. This playfulness is accompanied by a lot of progressive political point-scoring: the plague is a made-up excuse to keep people in their place every form of authority is cruelly repressive. Jonathan Wild, Sheppard’s adversary, is a “lizardy fuckwit”. The text then lapses into outright anachronisms such as “his heart scampered like a trapped chipmunk”. The lost manuscript never seems quite authentic, full of verbiage in praise of vaginas – “God of Sex-Shaking! God of Muff!” – and with a modern frankness to the sexual discourse that makes even Cleland’s Fanny Hill look shy.
Take an attendance register in class? Not Voth: “I’m both too scattered and Marxist to actually police my students in that way.” This purports to be Sheppard’s true confessions and comes adorned with excited and tangential footnotes by the aformentioned gullible academic, Dr R Voth, who turns out to be the book’s most entertaining character, in the vein of Charles Kinbote in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. The structure revolves around that staple of meta-fiction, the discovery of a lost manuscript. Luckily, Rosenberg is far too clever not to be aware of these pitfalls, and he incorporates them into this bawdy, ticklish, witty book, playing off unreliable narrators and parallel transgender narratives. Meanwhile, Jack has started drinking a contraband elixir distilled by pirates that turns out to be a rudimentary form of hormone therapy.Ī powerful motive for writing historical fiction is to supply what one finds unaccountably missing from historical sources and authorities, but to write for this reason alone is inevitably anachronistic and self-interested. Bess is fond of quoting Spinoza’s Ethics in between clients. He has soon picked the lock of his apprentice’s shackles and fallen in love with a doughty sex worker called Bess, known to history as Bess Lyon, or Edgeworth Bess from Middlesex, but updated here to become Bess Kahn, daughter of a Lascar sailor and a fen-dwelling mother. Jack, of course, has no intention of being any such thing. ‘A bawdy, ticklish, witty book’ … Jordy Rosenberg.
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