Alex Clark
JAMES MIRANDA BARRY by Patricia Duncker (Serpent’s Tail)
Patricia Duncker has nipped and tucked at history and bent it to her own purposes in this peculiar tale of cross-dressing in the 19th century. Drawing on the real historical figure of Dr James Miranda Barry, who has already been the subject of factual analysis and a novel published in the 1930s, she presents a confusing and at times wilfully obscure piece of picaresque writing.
The real Dr Barry was an eminent army doctor between 1815 and 1859, whose gender and sexual identity was the subject of much speculation during and after his lifetime. As Duncker retells this story, the question of whether he was really a she is only one of a series of unsolved mysteries that accrete to this bizarre, resolutely unknowable character. In a narrative that shifts between the first and third person and hops flightily around the colonised world, it is the entire issue of personal identity that is brought under scrutiny.
In fact, James Barry is a man created by a powerful cartel of other men, consisting of a barren aristocrat, Barry’s mother’s lover, the exotic Venezuelan General Francisco de Miranda, and his uncle, a foul-tempered and capricious artist who may also be his father.
The meeting at which the small girl- child is turned, by committee decision, into a boy, is itself dreamlike, half- hallucinatory. Half earnest desire to make the most out of a child who would be “wasted as a woman”, half practical joke, the ruse is perpetuated until Barry’s death, by which time he has travelled to South Africa, the Greek Islands and Jamaica, spreading medical enlightenment and sanitary control, endlessly in search of a paradoxical mixture of professional celebrity and personal anonymity.
Much of what we have come to expect of the modern historical novel is on offer here: the rigid class system; squalor and superstition butting up against rationalism and progress; revolutionary generals, stuffy colonials and lascivious, money- grabbing painters; women who struggle to step out of their ordained roles.
One of the novel’s most absorbing undercurrents is the exorbitant mother- love experienced by Barry as a small child, and his later dedication to the adventurer Alice, who is ambition personified.
These two immoderate attachments dominate Barry, and are made to work hard to carry what often appears as a thinly realised inner life. His bloodlessness is a weakness in the novel, and points up a common trait of the historically reconstructed character, here and elsewhere.
DUNCKER WRITES EXPRESSIVELY AND WITH MUCH PASSION, BUT TOO OFTEN SHE APPEARS TO BE STRUGGLING WITH THE BURDEN OF HER MATERIAL, AND VEERING WILDLY BETWEEN CLUMSILY HANDLED REGISTERS. QUITE POSSIBLY, THOUGH, MEDIATING BETWEEN CONFUSIONS OF PATERNITY, PROBLEMS OF GENDER IDENTITY AND THE UNEXPLORED PRACTICAL EXIGENCIES OF A LIFE SPENT POSING AS A MAN IS A TALL ORDER FOR ANY WRITER.