Misfortune was the first novel from Wesley Stace, who is also known as 'gangsta-folk' artist John Wesley Harding. As Harding, Stace has released several albums beginning in the late 1980s. At that time, Stace abandoned a PhD he was seeking in order to focus on becoming a full time professional musician. During that time, he wrote a song entitled 'Miss Fortune' about a male baby who is found orphaned by a wealthy man and brought up as a girl. This song served as the genesis for the novel. (For an extensive interview I was fortunate enough to conduct with Stace about his music career and his first novel, go here.)
Misfortune, which is set in the latter part of the nineteenth century, begins just like the song. Lord Lovall discovers the infant in a trash pile and brings him home, and, for reasons of his own, names him Rose and raises him as a girl. Rose lives an idyllic life in the English countryside, surrounded by family and friends, until secondary sexual characteristics begin to manifest themselves and life becomes, as you can imagine, far more complicated. This exploration of gender, identity, different types of love and the quality of love earned almost universal praise when it was released and appeared on many 'Best Of' lists for 2005.
I loved this book for a number of reasons. Firstly, it can be honestly described as 'Dickensian' in its setting, ambition, and sprawl. Characters have names that would have pleased Dickens, and the bizarre interactions between some of them, and the neat ending, are also traits associated with the master. Secondly, while the style is certainly a throwback to the novelists of the nineteenth century, the subject matter most certainly contains a more modern slant. The concept of sexual identity was not completely foreign to the writers of that time, but probably wouldn't have been viewed through the lens of late twentieth century morays as this book is.
Misfortune is a thoroughly entertaining novel. It keeps the reader interested and is ambitious in scope and size, especially for a first novel (albeit one many years in the making). I love big novels wherein a reader can get lost in a familiar, but ultimately fabricated world, and this is one of them.
