“Misfortune”
by Wesley Stace
Published: April 2006
ISBN: 0316154482

(Updated: August 18, 2006.)

From Amazon.com…

One of the most auspicious debuts of recent years, Wesley Stace’s Misfortune follows the rise, fall, and triumphant return of Rose Old, a foundling rescued from a London garbage heap in 1820 by the richest man in Britain. Lord Geoffroy Loveall, whose character has been shaped by perpetual mourning for a sister who died in childhood, seizes on the infant as a replacement for his beloved sister. With the help of trusted servants, he arranges for the child to be lovingly brought up at his ancestral mansion, Loveall Hall—to all appearances, his biological daughter and unhoped-for heir. No matter that the baby is not a girl.

The story thus far is so engaging, and the details of Rose’s childhood so playfully rendered (when she was first brought to Loveall Hall, the staff of 250 included a servant whose sole responsibility was to iron newspapers before their second reading), that it is with reluctance that the reader meets the inevitable rude, scheming relatives whose plotting will lead to the “misfortune” of the title. Luckily, Stace (the given name of the musician John Wesley Harding) takes too much delight in Rose to dump her back on the garbage heap, or at least not for long. The cross-dressing love child of Great Expectations and A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Misfortune will find you breathlessly tracking the movements of its principal players, and applauding the most ridiculous twists of fate. —Regina Marler

It is very rare for me to take a month to read a book. I’m still not sure why this was. I read it daily. I looked forward to re-finding it. I wanted to know what “the next thing” was. And it took me a month to read it.

Maybe it is because the book is rich in feeling that isn’t directly described. The main character speaks from “brain” but what is transmitted is rather an amazing experience of “being”. And, with the story so far from anything I’ve known — plot, person, situation, location and period-wise — perhaps each sentence, paragraph or page required “time” to expand it into the experience this book was.

It was an odd book situated in England in the early 1800’s. Strange details — not the obvious ones — made it clear that it wasn’t “now”. Even the details mentioned and those left out were part of my “expansion” somehow. The language — the vocabulary, the constructs, the variations between life “situations” — was “of the time” although I’m not sure how close this would be to the English of “then”. And then there was the story…

Steve Martin did a sketch in the 80’s about screwing your children up by spending their first years on this planet teaching them the wrong words for everything. The “funny part” was their release into the “real” world. Somehow this book is that sketch minus the Steve Martin “funny” part. Where is the line between learning and being “gender”? And, although this book could be seen as an elaborate and imaginative instantiation of the old “nature versus nurture” discussion, it goes far beyond that.

Placing this book in a language that “we know but don’t” makes us — well, made me — listen “anew”. Placing this book in a context that we accept as being sexist and “class-ist” makes today’s “subtleties” shine larger in what is perhaps, simply, their “politeness”. And the thread around “history” — the how of it, the what of it — is part of this book’s fibre and is certainly not to be ignored.

All in all, an odd, rather brilliant book in my humble opinion. I’m quite convinced that the brilliance of it, the amazingly articulated singular perspective this book moves us in, will continue to unfold outwards as I move through our “today’s society”. At the very least, I have another quote to add to my collection… “I simply smiled at him. I wasn’t in charge of other people’s manners…”