Certain types of novel have recently become popular. One is the autobiography as fiction, usually a coming-of-age memoir, sparsely written, with the real names changed. Another is the detective/murder thriller upgraded to literary status (Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy). And another is the fictional recreation of a real-life historical figure, well-researched and thoroughly brought to life, with added modern bits, such as a strong sexual context and a struggle for individual identity which is often more indebted to modern psychology than to the culture in which the characters actually lived.
James Miranda Barry, Patricia Duncker's second novel, is in that vein. Barry was an Edinburgh woman who disguised herself as a man in order to become a surgeon and thereafter had an amazing career, travelling the world and tending to the Empire's war-wounded in Cyprus and the West Indies. In the Crimea, Florence Nightingale said of Barry, who had an infamous temper, that she had never met "such a blackguard", unaware of the feminine reality underneath the military greatcoat. Barry is even suspected of having hidden a pregnancy and of travelling to the island of Mauritius, 2,000 miles away, to secretly give birth to a child. He/she is also reputed to have fought, and survived, a duel (as, mercifully, did her opponent). It was only after her death in 1865 that Barry's real gender was revealed, although there were always whispers. It is a fascinating story and those aspects of it that Duncker uses she turns into an entertaining yarn, but not a particularly vivid one, and one is left with the desire to read an actual biography of Barry, of which it seems there are many.
Duncker almost squanders the material by trying too hard, gilding the lily or, in this case, over-painting the magnolias, since much of the story is set in the lush tropics of South America. The story also takes a while to get going, since the early sections are seen through a child's eyes, an annoying device for this reader, especially when it contains inherently false adult notes. Duncker is a teacher of writing and feminist theory and Miranda Barry is soon burdened with some predictable socio-political deductions. Nevertheless, it is a lively read, especially when Dr Barry goes to Jamaica, encountering black magic and voodoo, and to South Africa, where she tends to bawdy colonists and soldiers. There is an interesting portrait of her uncle, the Irish-born painter, James Barry, and a continual sense of suspense is sustained as to whether her real sexual identity will be discovered.
Nor is Barry any mere surgeon, having helped to pioneer medical hygiene and caesarean birth. "The most common cause of disease in gentlemen of your class, sir," she tells a pompous governor, "is a lack of exercise and bad diet". The soundest of advice is often the simplest and, in this case, he (or she) should know.
Eamon Delaney is a novelist