2020/138: The Perfect Gentleman: The Remarkable Life of Dr James Miranda Barry -- June Rose

‘Good form’ was not enough for her – she needed to believe in the innate chivalry of a gentleman in order to maintain her masquerade. [loc. 1209]

James Miranda Barry (1789-1865) was, by vocation, a military surgeon who advocated hygiene and humane treatment of the mentally ill, strove to ignore racism in South African society, and insisted that 'it was better to be without advice than to have bad advice whether in Law or Physic’. Dr Barry was also a woman who lived her whole life, from boyhood, as a man. Though, according to this biography, 'everyone knew': rumours were rife during Barry's lifetime, and when the charwoman who laid out the body exclaimed that 'it's a woman', the staff surgeon was not especially surprised.

This may say more about Victorian attitudes to gender and medicine than it says about Barry as a person, though. Several of the opinions and accounts quoted by Rose indicate a very clear prejudice against those who didn't conform to gender stereotypes: "the physique, the absence of hair, the voice, all pointed one way and the petulance of temper, the unreasoning impulsiveness, the fondness for pets were in the same direction." [loc. 127] Barry was regarded as 'extraordinary' or 'odd' in appearance and 'eccentric' in behaviour, and had a reputation for argument, independent thinking and bypassing the rigorous procedures of the military. Florence Nightingale, never afraid to use her femininity to get what she wanted, quarrelled with Barry, who'd achieved success in a man's world by pretending to be a man: "After she was dead I was told she was a woman. I should say she was the most hardened creature I ever met throughout the army." [loc. 2394]

June Rose is a meticulous biographer, examining the evidence and making it clear when she's extrapolating from her sources. She examines Barry's (likely) childhood experience, connection to high society, and education at Edinburgh University. Barry's career took her to South Africa -- where she may have borne a child to her long-term friend and protector Lord Charles Somerset -- and to the Caribbean, and through a series of increasingly disputatious conflicts with her superiors. Much of Barry's medical work seems to have consisted in treating and preventing disease, rather than battle-field surgery, but she was certainly capable of the latter.

I was familiar with Barry's story from Patricia Duncker's fictionalised account, James Miranda Barry. I believe that novel uses the male pronoun throughout, as Barry did: this biography, on the other hand, refers to Barry as 'she', which I found ... slightly jarring. June Rose -- writing in 1977 -- does address the eagerness of nineteenth-century society to diagnose Barry as a 'hermaphrodite', an intersex person. Discussing one eminent physician's opinion, she writes '[his] obsession with the specifically sexual identity is typical of a common – and predominantly male – assumption that a woman by nature would have been incapable of sustaining the masquerade and attaining such professional prominence'. [loc. 2610]

I suspect that a biographer writing Barry's story today would respect his pronouns (which sadly I have not done here), and perhaps venture further into Barry's private life -- and biology. But I did find this an illuminating and compassionate account of an unusual and courageous life.

Read for the 'a biography' rubric of the Reading Women Challenge 2020.

2020/137: Our House is on Fire -- Malena Ernman

Hope is extremely important, but it will come later. When your house is on fire you don’t start by sitting down at the kitchen table and telling the family how nice it will be once you’ve finished renovating and building the add-ons. When your house is on fire you call 999, you waken everyone you can and you crawl towards the front door.’ [loc. 1803]

Our House Is On Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis was written by Greta Thunberg, her mother Malena Ernman (the primary narrator), her father Svante and her sister Beata. The personal is political, and the microcosm of Greta's family -- her own, initially undiagnosed autism, her sister's ADHD, her mother's international opera career, her father's youthful habit of memorising airline timetables -- is the more immediate aspect of the book. It's an intimate and honest account of the sheer difficulty of living with, and finding a diagnosis for, a young girl whose psychiatric problems are inextricably entwined with her growing understanding of the headlong rush towards ecological catastrophe. The family theorise that the girls' mental health issues are part of a web of issues that disproportionately affect women and the highly sensitive: that the mental health epidemic, with its facets of loneliness, isolation, depression and inability to adjust to the modern world, is the result of prioritising wealth and power over the natural world and the human mind.

I found the 'family' chapters, the story of how they reimagined and redefined and renegotiated their lives together, moving and relateable: the sections on climate change didn't feel as thoughtful or as well-presented. Possibly because, like most people, I've heard them all before -- sometimes literally, in that there are phrases that recur in Greta's speeches -- and possibly because they are written in oratory style: many short sentences, building on one another. There isn't much in the way of solid fact here, but that's fine because we all know where to find it: however, I would have liked slightly more supporting science.

Read for the 'a woman who inspires you' element of the Reading Women Challenge 2020: I really struggled with this rubric because I found it hard to identify 'famous' women who I find inspirational. I'm amazed and impressed by Greta, though, and I am inspired by her message (nobody is too small to make a difference) and her forthright delivery of it.

2020/136: Surfacing -- Kathleen Jamie

‘How long have you people been here?’ ‘’Bout ten thousand years. In winter we come up here on snow machines...' [p. 80]

A collection of essays, ranging from conversations between the author and her elderly father, to memories of a long-ago stay in Tibet, to archaeology in the Arctic and the Orkneys. I found the archaeology chapters most fascinating, especially Jamie's account of her stay in a Yup'ik community in Alaska. There, the permafrost is melting and exposing objects dating back hundreds of years, from a time before settlers and missionaries and oil pipelines. Jamie splendidly conveys the sense of continuity felt, and clung to, by the Yup'ik. Though the temptations of 'modern' life are encroaching on the village, the villagers still live in ways that their ancestors would have recognised: they are attentive to their environment, to the minute changes and signs of life that might indicate good hunting, a change in the weather, a bear roaming down from the empty tundra. This is life on the front line of the climate emergency, and the Yup'ik are well aware that change is coming and that they may need to revert to older ways of life if the planes stop coming.

Kathleen Jamie, an acclaimed poet, is fascinated by the deep past: there's a marvellous account of her reflections on a cave in the Scottish Highlands, where bear bones from the Ice Age have been discovered. 'The skull was in the cave and what was in the skull? Bear mind, bear memory – when autumn came and the nights began to freeze, he remembered where the cave-mouth was, so he padded across the glacier.' [p. 3] And she's equally engaged with the distant past that is uncovered by ferocious storms that sweep away the sand dunes in Orkney. She evokes a sense of place and of presence, a sense that there were people who lived there on the coast, intimately aware of and interacting with the world around them.

All the essays in this volume display an intellectual response to the world that incorporates a subjective, emotional response without triteness or sentimentality. The essays about the changing, damaged world have an immediacy that I found very affecting and effective. Lucid and beautiful prose, too.

Read for the 'about the environment' rubric of the Reading Women Challenge 2020.

2020/135: Broken Places and Outer Spaces -- Nnedi Okorafor

Writing the story was a spark to dry kindling. The act of creating a story had a delicious sensation and I instantly fell madly in love with it. It felt like stepping off the edge of a cliff on purpose when you subconsciously knew you had the ability to fly. It took me to a place where I didn’t need to walk. [p. 73]

When Nnedi Okorafor was 19 and already a successful athlete, she underwent an operation to combat the effects of scoliosis. The operation had a 1% failure rate: Okorafor was that 1%, and woke paralysed from the waist down. 

After this catastrophe, which she calls the Breaking, she experienced hallucinations, despair, agony: she also drew on her knowledge of Frida Kahlo, whose art was powered by her own chronic pain, and Mary Shelley, who may have written Frankenstein as a way of dealing with pain and fear. Okorafor began to scribble stories in the margins of a book -- in the margins, in fact, of I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. 

Though she wasn't at that point writing SF, she did consider the irony of her paralysis having made her more suited to life in space or in water, where gravity wouldn't interfere: due to nerve damage, her proprioception (sense of where one's body is) was unreliable. Thinking about how technology might assist and support her, how she might become a cyborg, sat oddly with her loss of faith in science. Then, during her recovery period, a friend suggested she take a creative writing class: and it clicked. Visits to family in Nigeria inspired her to write about the Nigeria she experienced -- a place of the future as much as, or more than, the past -- and to explore Africanfuturism, 'similar to Afrofuturism, but ... specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and perspective, where the centre is non-Western' [p. 83]. 

I was struck by Okorafor's resilience and determination, and also by her matter-of-fact account of the bad days: the hallucinations, the rage and despair, the fears that she faced. (Try driving at night when you can't feel your foot on the pedal.) The ways in which she's sublimated pain into art, and accepted her body's limitations while working to minimise them, are humbling. And I'm fascinated by the process that led her to recognise the disconnect between the Nigerian and American aspects of her heritage, and the way she's worked to integrate them. 

A short book, but there's a lot in it: skimming for this review, I found myself rereading chapters I'd half-forgotten. I'm certain that I'll be looking out for elements of this story, transmuted, in my future readings of her fiction. 

Read for the 'featuring a woman with a disability' rubric of the Reading Women Challenge 2020.

2020/134: A Pure Heart -- Rajia Hassib

she feels she is losing herself, that she has been shredded into parts that have been scattered, like Osiris’s body... unlike him, her scattering is not restricted to Egypt, but is global: her arms in Egypt at her parents’, wrapped around them in a tight hug; her head in New York, studying and producing enviable scholarly work; her legs in West Virginia, hiking its many trails; her heart buried with Gameela. [loc. 2667]

Rose's sister Gameela has been killed by a suicide bomber in Cairo. Their parents are devastated. Rose, who's flown back from New York, leaving behind her husband Mark and her high-profile Egyptology career, is trying to make sense of what Gameela left behind: a teacup of unfamiliar pattern, documents that indicate she quit her job, a newspaper clipping of a boy with intense eyes. Rose finds parallels with her current project at the Met, which involves exploration of the ancient Egyptian view of the afterlife: a place to which one can address letters, a place from which the beloved dead can return. A place in which the avowal of a pure heart would preserve the soul. 

Gameela was a devout Muslim, who wore the hijab and didn't hide her mistrust of Rose's husband's insincere conversion to Islam, undertaken so that the two could marry. Rose -- who feels nostalgic when called by her birth name, Fayrouz -- still prays five times a day, but religion isn't the centre of her life in the way that she's becoming to realise it was for her sister. And as she learns more about her sister's life and death, she comes to realise she may inadvertently have been complicit in Gameela's murder. 

This was an intriguing insight into Egyptian life, and the aftermath of the 2011 revolution. I hadn't been aware of just how divided (and corrupt) Egyptian society is, or how overshadowed by postcolonial attitudes. Rose's reconstruction of Gameela's last months of life -- and her own growing alienation from her husband and from American life -- formed a compelling account of the privilege and prejudice experienced by educated middle-class women in Egypt. 

But I did feel the novel didn't live up to the promise of its early chapters, the influence of ancient mythology, the history of a land that has seven thousand years of history and nearly as many of occupation. It's not Gameela who needs piecing together like Osiris: it's Rose, who contains multitudes and wears different masks for family, for husband, for Egyptian society and for her colleagues in America. By the end of the novel she's closer to reconciling the many versions of herself, and perhaps closer to understanding the decisions made and secrets kept by Gameela: it's a hopeful ending, rather than a conclusive one. 

 Read for the 'by an Arab woman' rubric of the Reading Women Challenge 2020.

2020/133: Consolation Songs -- Iona Datt Sharma (ed.)

You can take a red pen to the world and point out its flaws, but you can't force every change. [loc. 1379: 'Four', by Freya Marske]

Subtitled 'Optimistic Speculative Fiction for a Time of Pandemic': all proceeds from this anthology were donated to the COVID-19 appeal run by University College London Hospitals NHS Trust. I bought it because I could do with some consolation, and also because most of the stories are by women, thus fulfilling the 'anthology by multiple authors' rubric of the Reading Women Challenge 2020. Plus, though I didn't recognise all the authors' names, those I recognised had good associations. 

 And it was so good to read positive and uplifting fiction! Twelve short stories, twelve very different voices, twelve happy endings. (Also a lot of loving queerness: about a third of the stories feature same-sex romantic relationships, and several more have significant relationships that aren't romantic or sexual.) 

 There isn't a weak story in here, though some are shorter and less weighty than others. My favourite three, in no particular order, were 'Four' by Freya Marske (in which the four horsemen of the apocalypse are neighbours in suburban New Zealand); 'St Anselm-by-the-Riverside', by editor Iona Datt Sharma (in which a middle-aged ward sister in an alternate, frozen London finds love and hope); and 'Love, Your Flatmate' by Stephanie Burgis Samphire (in which a fey composer and a human editor are forced to share a flat during lockdown). Those are my favourite three right now, but ask me again in a week and I might give you a different answer. 

 Not just consolation here, but comfort and hope and joy and love -- and surprisingly little sentimentality.

2020/132: The Hollow Places -- T Kingfisher

You can, if you find yourself in a strange world, ignore the intuition of your friend who devoured his twin in the womb and is seeing the world with one of her eyes. You would probably be foolish to do so, but I suppose it’s an option that you do have. [loc. 1110]

Kingfisher's latest novel is based on Algernon Blackwood's novella 'The Willows', of which I had only vague memories. That's set during a canoe trip down the Danube: The Hollow Places, in contrast, is set in small-town America, in Hog Chapel, North Carolina. Kara, newly-divorced and broke, is offered a place to live by her Uncle Earl, who owns and runs the Wonder Museum -- a place that fascinated Kara as a child (she decided the stuffed elk was the Great Prince from Bambi, and adored him accordingly) and which now seems a charming backwater of the weird, the mysterious and the kitsch. A place of safety. 

 Little does she know, et cetera. 

 With her new friend Simon, who is flamboyantly queer and works in the coffee shop where Kara gets her wifi, Kara discovers a passage to another world. It's not a nice place. There is evidence of military presence; there are many little islands, all similar but not identical; there are silvery willow trees; there is a message that reads 'Pray they are hungry'. Only gradually do Simon and Kara work out the nature of 'they': and when they finally manage to find the portal back to their own world, that's not the end of their story. 

 I was drawn into the story by Kingfisher's blend of the truly horrific and the oddball humorous. The humour doesn't mellow the horror -- indeed, it sharpens it by way of contrast -- but it brings the characters to life in a way that distinguishes them from the standard horror movie cast. Kara, in particular, is the kind of fannish geek with whom I thoroughly identify. She has 'very strong feelings that C. S. Lewis had not spent nearly enough time on the sudden realization, when moving between worlds, that nothing could be taken for granted' [loc. 878] 

 Despite the humour and the comfortable geekery, this is not a frivolous novel. There is a vivid sense of risk, and several points where I couldn't see how the protagonists (or the cat Beau) were going to survive. And Kara's method of protecting herself (distraction with pain) made me queasy, but is utterly credible. Splendid, ominous and a very interesting transformation of Blackwood's original story.

2020/131: Boyfriend Material -- Alexis Hall

I’d spent five years not wanting to be helped. And it had taken nearly losing my job, dating a guy I would never have considered dating... and having some dick from a nightclub feel sorry for me in the Guardian for me to realise that I hadn’t been as safe as I thought I was. [p. 394]

Luc has grown up with a terrible handicap: he is the children of famous, estranged, rock-star parents. This has made him tabloid fodder, culminating five years ago in his ex selling all Luc's secrets to the tabloids. Since then Luc has lived a rather reclusive life, with a small group of good friends and a solid relationship with his mum (who is awesome). 

 Unfortunately Luc makes the mistake of chatting to a bloke at a party and then being photographed tripping and falling -- or, as the red-tops would have it, 'drunkenly staggering out of a nightclub'. Luc's employers, the Coleoptera Research and Protection Project (an entertainingly-acronymed charity devoted to saving dung-beetles), require him to find an 'appropriate' boyfriend before his antics drive away the sponsors. 

 His friends rally round, and Token Straight Friend [sic] Bridget suggests the only other gay man she knows, barrister Oliver Blackwood, who's previously made it clear that he wants nothing to do with Luc. Nevertheless, needs must: Oliver, too, has a social engagement for which he needs a significant other. Cue operation Fake Boyfriend, which gradually metamorphoses into something rather more sincere. 

This is a light-hearted read with some dark undercurrents. Luc's mother is an absolute delight, but his father is ... less so. Luc himself has spent so long pushing people away for fear of getting hurt that he's forgotten how to let people in. And Oliver is not without his own issues, though they're initially less visible through the polished and principled exterior. 

 The supporting cast were great, and generally well-rounded, especially Bridget (who works in publishing and endures a succession of hilarious-to-everyone-else crises) and Alex (Luc's incredibly dense colleague: unable to distinguish between jury trials and badgers). I also loved the different ways in which those close to Luc accept him with all his bitterness and damage.

Despite Luc's hollowness and depression, he is a hilarious first-person narrator, even if some of his most barbed asides are aimed at himself. In a way it's not just Luc learning to love someone else, but also rediscovering a sense of self-worth. 

  Boyfriend Material was the perfect read for a November evening in lockdown. It cheered me massively, and I intend to read more by Alexis Hall.