The Doctor: A Novel / Patricia Duncker

The Doctor is an elegant exploration of the way gender and identity shape a life. The starring role in Patricia Duncker's third novel is given to James Miranda Barry, a historical figure who enrolled as a medical student at Edinburgh during the early 1800s and carved out an illustrious career on three continents. Nothing too strange about that--except that this formidable physician, duelist, and man-about-town was actually a woman. Duncker has created "an imaginative exploration" of the real Barry's life, adjusting facts and adding figures to transform a story of love and adventure into a masque of sexual identity. Here is a ripping good yarn in which the hero is really the leading lady, and the love interest is a kitchen maid turned actress, who relishes "the breeches parts" in Shakespeare's plays. It makes for an enthralling tale, peopled with actors and soldiers, artists and revolutionaries. And the illicit liaisons and family secrets provide an appropriately vertiginous backdrop for Barry's own transformation into someone who was "neither man nor woman but partook of both."

Duncker's literary skills are no less disorienting. Her prose is cool and clean, shot through with lush descriptions of the natural landscape (indeed, she seems to reserve her decadence for the flora and fauna). And she never attempts to simplify her protagonist's existence. "You are who the world says you are," the kitchen maid proclaims to her gender-bending beloved. "And the world says you're a man." For Duncker, however, it's never quite that simple. In The Doctor, Barry plays out this manly charade with a subtle, startling awareness of "his" womanly identity. It makes for a very sophisticated narrative wherein all surfaces are deceptive and all experiences are quite literally subject to double vision. --Eithne Farry
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