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In Transit: An Heroi-Cyclic Novel
Set in an airport ("one of the rare places where twentieth-century design is happy with its own style"), In Transit is a textual labyrinth centering on a contemporary traveller. Waiting for a flight, Evelyn Hillary O'Rooley suffers from uncertainty about his/her gender, provoking him/her to perform a series of unsuccessful, yet hilarious, philosophical and anatomical tests. Brigid Brophy surrounds the kernel of this plot with an unrelenting stream of puns, word games, metafictional moments and surreal situations (like a lesbian revolution in the baggage claim area) that challenge the reader's preconceptions about life and fiction and that remain endlessly entertaining.
235 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1969
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572 people want to read
About the author
Brigid Brophy
40 books50 followersBrigid Antonia Brophy, Lady Levey (12 June 1929, in Ealing, Middlesex, England – 7 August 1995, in Louth, Lincolnshire, England) was an English novelist, essayist, critic, biographer, and dramatist. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists since 1960, S. J. Newman described her as "one of the oddest, most brilliant, and most enduring of [the] 1960s symptoms."
She was a feminist and pacifist who expressed controversial opinions on marriage, the Vietnam War, religious education in schools, sex (she was openly bisexual), and pornography. She was a vocal campaigner for animal rights and vegetarianism. A 1965 Sunday Times article by Brophy is credited by psychologist Richard D. Ryder with having triggered the formation of the animal rights movement in England.
Because of her outspokenness, she was labeled many things, including "one of our leading literary shrews" by a Times Literary Supplement reviewer. "A lonely, ubiquitous toiler in the weekend graveyards, she has scored some direct hits on massive targets: Kingsley Amis, Henry Miller, Professor Wilson Knight."
Brophy was married to art historian Sir Michael Levey. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1984, which took her life 11 years later at the age of 66.
She was a feminist and pacifist who expressed controversial opinions on marriage, the Vietnam War, religious education in schools, sex (she was openly bisexual), and pornography. She was a vocal campaigner for animal rights and vegetarianism. A 1965 Sunday Times article by Brophy is credited by psychologist Richard D. Ryder with having triggered the formation of the animal rights movement in England.
Because of her outspokenness, she was labeled many things, including "one of our leading literary shrews" by a Times Literary Supplement reviewer. "A lonely, ubiquitous toiler in the weekend graveyards, she has scored some direct hits on massive targets: Kingsley Amis, Henry Miller, Professor Wilson Knight."
Brophy was married to art historian Sir Michael Levey. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1984, which took her life 11 years later at the age of 66.
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August 4, 2016Let’s get this out of the way first before we begin. Brigid Brophy receives not only absolution for the blasphemy, but full sanction for future blasphemy, of Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without (CBR : “Only fifty?”) on account of her novel, In Transit: An Heroi-Cyclic Novel. But I’ll keep my Moby-Dick and a heck of a lot more.
So but if Rikki Ducornet gets to be “Lady Rabelais” I think Brophy gets to be Lady something or other. And for that I’m going out on a limb here, even without authorization from our local Gil’s Boy who may not endorse this suggestion (but I’m out on a limb I said) but I’ll say that Brophy is our Lady Sorrentino. If that suggestion is just too much then I’ll be happy to leave her filed in among those Irish greats :: Joyce - O’Brien - Beckett - Brophy (who else?). But In Transit is pretty fantastic.
I really do not want to go all Blue Pastoral in this Review. But I maybe=might understand why our under=discussion book didn’t flip the switches of Sorrentino’s executor (oh, wait, that other O’Brien’s published this ; so perhaps a few divisions in Camp O’Gil) ; because here was my thought through this one, “I haven’t had this much loose and locker fun with a book having punnable=funnable with language jokes and jakes since the days of Gilligan's Wake: A Novel.” Honest, I’m not going all Blue Pastoral here ; I’m just trying to account for a difference in preference with a reader who ought to be within everyone’s preference ; honest. Let me say only that the two excerpts in Dear MJ’s review represent only two of the many languages which are played In Transit ; and so in addition to the funnable=punnable it becomes a delicious bowl of Stew.
But isn’t that the problem with making aesthetic judgements about a novel based upon prose? Making sentence=level judgments about novels? That the kind of impressionistic aesthetic of a Ford Madox Ford (turn to page 96 and read the first full sentence ; the book will be like that -- to take a parodic version of the method), or an aesthetic judgement which plays always and only off the pinnacles of such-like experimental masters as James or Woolf, can only level (verb) the effect of a novel like In Transit which is not modernist or impressionistic or shimmering and shining with prose described with this adjective and that adjective :: no, I mean the ax I’m grinding here is that a novel written out of Rabelais’ Codpiece is a a different kind of beast :: and the prose is judged not under the rubric of “is it beautiful” but rather, Does this prose do what it is supposed to do? So the question of “bad” prose is moot.
Okay, too, this is a smart novel. With an additional 300=odd pages it’d be a shoe=in for one of those excellent encyclopedic novels, those fat bricks everyone’s talking about. But meanwhile Heroicyclic will do just fine. So I’ve said already that it dances with poly- poly- poly-language (with enough crackers to feed the flock) ; I did not catalog those languages, but there are plenty ;; and a few of those languages, like some of the extended anal-ytic scenes are just as cramped and dull as they are intended to be ;;; such is the nature of anal-ysis. But then so what ; wait around for that cracker-barrel to crack open. And then there’s the thing that you may not be interested in things like : latin and greek and logic and sin=tax and Gaelic orthography and opera and bifocal narrative columns and jumping first/second/third person narratives or even knowing quite what’s going on. But it’s a smart novel and the smart reader will delight. I mean, this is literature much more sophisticated than the NYT Sunday Crossword Puzzle. [do i have to add also that smart readers may differ]
Okay, too, and just as a continuation of that hollow question I asked in my recent Woolf review ; the thing about the Türing Test for Gender. This is where it operates and becomes explicit. The (classic) Türing Test : to determine whether the interlocutor (let’s say s/he is in a box) is a machine or a human (i.e., a Q related to Q’s of AI). But the Türing Test for Gender here is like this :: take a piece of prose ; determine whether it is written by man or woman. My readerly contortion of this test : take a reader-response statement (fir-instance, a single responsive sentence summarizing the reading) ; was it man or woman who read? Or, in the instance of In Transit : take the protagonist ; is it male or female? I’ll tell you this, Dear Review Reader, the protagonist of In Transit has Gender Amnesia ; and stuck in a social situation, an airport, must determine which h/se is because that bladder is getting full...... etc. But that is only one of the many events in transit ; there is also a revolution.
Okay so I said something about style and I said something about content. That should be enough for today. This is really fantastic. I want more Brophy please.
This has not been a Blue Pastoral.
So but if Rikki Ducornet gets to be “Lady Rabelais” I think Brophy gets to be Lady something or other. And for that I’m going out on a limb here, even without authorization from our local Gil’s Boy who may not endorse this suggestion (but I’m out on a limb I said) but I’ll say that Brophy is our Lady Sorrentino. If that suggestion is just too much then I’ll be happy to leave her filed in among those Irish greats :: Joyce - O’Brien - Beckett - Brophy (who else?). But In Transit is pretty fantastic.
I really do not want to go all Blue Pastoral in this Review. But I maybe=might understand why our under=discussion book didn’t flip the switches of Sorrentino’s executor (oh, wait, that other O’Brien’s published this ; so perhaps a few divisions in Camp O’Gil) ; because here was my thought through this one, “I haven’t had this much loose and locker fun with a book having punnable=funnable with language jokes and jakes since the days of Gilligan's Wake: A Novel.” Honest, I’m not going all Blue Pastoral here ; I’m just trying to account for a difference in preference with a reader who ought to be within everyone’s preference ; honest. Let me say only that the two excerpts in Dear MJ’s review represent only two of the many languages which are played In Transit ; and so in addition to the funnable=punnable it becomes a delicious bowl of Stew.
But isn’t that the problem with making aesthetic judgements about a novel based upon prose? Making sentence=level judgments about novels? That the kind of impressionistic aesthetic of a Ford Madox Ford (turn to page 96 and read the first full sentence ; the book will be like that -- to take a parodic version of the method), or an aesthetic judgement which plays always and only off the pinnacles of such-like experimental masters as James or Woolf, can only level (verb) the effect of a novel like In Transit which is not modernist or impressionistic or shimmering and shining with prose described with this adjective and that adjective :: no, I mean the ax I’m grinding here is that a novel written out of Rabelais’ Codpiece is a a different kind of beast :: and the prose is judged not under the rubric of “is it beautiful” but rather, Does this prose do what it is supposed to do? So the question of “bad” prose is moot.
Okay, too, this is a smart novel. With an additional 300=odd pages it’d be a shoe=in for one of those excellent encyclopedic novels, those fat bricks everyone’s talking about. But meanwhile Heroicyclic will do just fine. So I’ve said already that it dances with poly- poly- poly-language (with enough crackers to feed the flock) ; I did not catalog those languages, but there are plenty ;; and a few of those languages, like some of the extended anal-ytic scenes are just as cramped and dull as they are intended to be ;;; such is the nature of anal-ysis. But then so what ; wait around for that cracker-barrel to crack open. And then there’s the thing that you may not be interested in things like : latin and greek and logic and sin=tax and Gaelic orthography and opera and bifocal narrative columns and jumping first/second/third person narratives or even knowing quite what’s going on. But it’s a smart novel and the smart reader will delight. I mean, this is literature much more sophisticated than the NYT Sunday Crossword Puzzle. [do i have to add also that smart readers may differ]
Okay, too, and just as a continuation of that hollow question I asked in my recent Woolf review ; the thing about the Türing Test for Gender. This is where it operates and becomes explicit. The (classic) Türing Test : to determine whether the interlocutor (let’s say s/he is in a box) is a machine or a human (i.e., a Q related to Q’s of AI). But the Türing Test for Gender here is like this :: take a piece of prose ; determine whether it is written by man or woman. My readerly contortion of this test : take a reader-response statement (fir-instance, a single responsive sentence summarizing the reading) ; was it man or woman who read? Or, in the instance of In Transit : take the protagonist ; is it male or female? I’ll tell you this, Dear Review Reader, the protagonist of In Transit has Gender Amnesia ; and stuck in a social situation, an airport, must determine which h/se is because that bladder is getting full...... etc. But that is only one of the many events in transit ; there is also a revolution.
Okay so I said something about style and I said something about content. That should be enough for today. This is really fantastic. I want more Brophy please.
This has not been a Blue Pastoral.
dropped
February 19, 2012Let’s face it, heroi-cyclic novels aren’t my speed. As with most Dalkeys, the blurb sounds like the greatest book experience ever: “a transsexual adventure . . . with an unrelenting stream of puns, word games, metafictional moments and surreal situations (lesbian revolution in the baggage area).” YES! And the book begins with sentences like:
No more can you detect your personality and its decisions in the course of being created by your experience. You know only that you ingest the present tense and excrete it as a narrative in the past. History is in the shit tense. You have left it behind you. Fiction is piss: a stream of past events but not behind you, because they never really happened.
YES! But then sentences pop up like:
I am incensed (I swing my savage indignation at you: aspersions ad te: bad on you: ego absolvere te nolo) by the cinemorgan design of twentieth-century cathedrals, all of which look as though they had risen out of the ground in a play of coloured-icecream lighting (but Fool-stop the organist has broken the mechanism which should, and would it would, cause them to sink down again).
Er, come again? And these sentences, basically, are the narrative, i.e. egghead Irish absurdism of the incomprehensible variety. Sorry, Brigid. You seemed like a super lady, a real counterculture battleaxe.
No more can you detect your personality and its decisions in the course of being created by your experience. You know only that you ingest the present tense and excrete it as a narrative in the past. History is in the shit tense. You have left it behind you. Fiction is piss: a stream of past events but not behind you, because they never really happened.
YES! But then sentences pop up like:
I am incensed (I swing my savage indignation at you: aspersions ad te: bad on you: ego absolvere te nolo) by the cinemorgan design of twentieth-century cathedrals, all of which look as though they had risen out of the ground in a play of coloured-icecream lighting (but Fool-stop the organist has broken the mechanism which should, and would it would, cause them to sink down again).
Er, come again? And these sentences, basically, are the narrative, i.e. egghead Irish absurdism of the incomprehensible variety. Sorry, Brigid. You seemed like a super lady, a real counterculture battleaxe.
February 12, 2019
So sugared with word play, multilingual punning, and narrative games as to throw even Christine Brooke Rose into diabetic shock. I admired the relentless cleverness, sentence to sentence, while initially completely failing to be drawn in throughout the opening quarter of the novel. But this was a section given over to the development of "linguistic leprosy" -- was this prose so absurdly self-reflexive as to be actually decomposing into unreadability by intention? I faired better in central two sections about about gender uncertainty -- initially via the oddities of sex in language, then something odder, if later remaining overly prone to forced dichotomies (the text literally splits in two, not the most-up-to-date metaphor). By the end though, all was in conflagration and collapse that should have generated a cataclysmic urgency but I couldn't feel a thing, semiotics supplanting semantics in a broken universe. So: intellectual interest throughout, engagement fleeting.
November 16, 2025
3.5 stars
September 3, 2020
What the hell happened there? The first 3rd of this is great. Very introspective, lot of different ideas, lot of puns, mostly its about language i think.
Its very experimental and 60s. The puns and other humour had a certain rythmn to them that made it feel almost like beatnik poetry in places.
The setup, person waiting in an airport, an important minor point is that they have a copy of the Story of O. Or some equivalent work, i think this one was something like the Language of Oc.
This 'Story of O' parody i eventually realise is another joke, with Oc representing language /grammer itself and the joke being that grammer is being tortured by authors these days or somthing.
Its also about sex, mostly it seems because in certain languages, such as french, all objects are made either male or female, a fact the author seems obsessed with. The tongue apparently is female.
However after the first third things start happening, events occur, and it becomes more external and less internal and far less interesting. I thought it might recover after this clunky middle section but instead it just turns into surreal parody with noir and fantasy bits and invasions of nuns and revolutionaries... its just complete bollocks.
Its all still quite tolerable with its puns and its nonsense but very disappointing after that opening. I'm trying to think if i've actually liked any of the so called experimental literature of the 60s?
In any case, this is another one thats more Frankenstein than Lisa (weird science).
Its very experimental and 60s. The puns and other humour had a certain rythmn to them that made it feel almost like beatnik poetry in places.
The setup, person waiting in an airport, an important minor point is that they have a copy of the Story of O. Or some equivalent work, i think this one was something like the Language of Oc.
This 'Story of O' parody i eventually realise is another joke, with Oc representing language /grammer itself and the joke being that grammer is being tortured by authors these days or somthing.
Its also about sex, mostly it seems because in certain languages, such as french, all objects are made either male or female, a fact the author seems obsessed with. The tongue apparently is female.
However after the first third things start happening, events occur, and it becomes more external and less internal and far less interesting. I thought it might recover after this clunky middle section but instead it just turns into surreal parody with noir and fantasy bits and invasions of nuns and revolutionaries... its just complete bollocks.
Its all still quite tolerable with its puns and its nonsense but very disappointing after that opening. I'm trying to think if i've actually liked any of the so called experimental literature of the 60s?
In any case, this is another one thats more Frankenstein than Lisa (weird science).
August 15, 2025
Yet another excellent novel from Brigid Brophy.
The playful (not just in terms of the plot but also regarding the wordplay and copious punning) story of gender-confused Pat's perambulations around an airport terminal is very entertaining.
The playful (not just in terms of the plot but also regarding the wordplay and copious punning) story of gender-confused Pat's perambulations around an airport terminal is very entertaining.
December 2, 2010
oh bunk. i just typed a bunch of oh so witty thoughts on Brophy and her novel, but to be lost to the ether. so in short summation, a wonderful, funny novel about being stuck in the airport, the meaning of life and our narratives (especially the ones we tell ourselves are "true"). here is a quote about our lives-in-books, and out of them:
"No more can you detect your personality and its decisions in the course of being created by your experiences. You know only that you ingest the present tense and excrete it as a narrative in the past.
History is in the shit tense. You have left it behind you. Fiction is piss: a stream of past events but not behind you, because they never really happened.
Hence the hold fictional narrative exerts on modern literate man. And hence the slightly shameful quality of its hold."
"No more can you detect your personality and its decisions in the course of being created by your experiences. You know only that you ingest the present tense and excrete it as a narrative in the past.
History is in the shit tense. You have left it behind you. Fiction is piss: a stream of past events but not behind you, because they never really happened.
Hence the hold fictional narrative exerts on modern literate man. And hence the slightly shameful quality of its hold."
July 27, 2014
A traveller at an airport suddenly cannot remember what sex s/he is, and this is the start of a long freewheeling surreal fantasy. Things to note first of all: Brophy was not as PC as we would be nowadays, you get the N-word on the first page (but never again after that); her portrayal of male homosexuality is very much rooted in old stereotypes, and it's not at all clear she's trying to explode them; although she plays a lot on Irish identity, what comes through is that she had a very detached, mocking view of it all, looking back in derision from an adopted English viewpoint. Yes I do realise this is not an autobiography and we should not read off characteristics of the narrator as belonging to the author, especially in a novel like this in which the roles are being ironised and undermined. Unfortunately it seems so obvious that this is Brigid Brophy's own voice breaking in all the time, as I've read other things by her and her tics are constant even when the style is supposed to be shifting. The tone is too consistently that of academic humour of the classical donnish variety, endless bad puns getting very near to being just Kathy Lette plus Latin references (Christine Brooke-Rose sailed near to these reefs as well, and she contributed the Introduction to this 2002 reprint). Quality control can be extremely variable, though she did craft a gem with the description of a lesbian coup d'etat as a "butsch".
That could be taken as a sign of failure, but I don't think there is an underlying project to be taken too seriously here (unlike in, for example, B.S.Johnson's books). The efforts at genre parody (hardboiled detective fiction, conspiracy thrillers) don't come off too well either, but are mercifully quite brief. Literary pornography, a fashionable topic back then, and taken more seriously than now, inspires some intriguingly dated satire. The better moments are the ones when Brophy follows the logic of the gender-amnesia device, working it through with some careful observational writing about airports as the exemplars of modern living. It also gets good again in the closing chapters, parodic of the student revolts of 1968, which the old elitist Brophy clearly thought were a lot of nonsense, and we also get an appearance by the topic of air-terrorism, which has become a larger phenomenon in the years since 1969. We end up in the same mood as Brooke-Rose's "Thru" a few years later, playing games with tradition and orthodoxy, whilst exasperated and irritated by the banality of youth's simultaneous unfocussed rebellion, with the "din of pop" that accompanies it. You can't break rules if you don't know any; clever women can scoff at the silly puffed-up men by making smart jokes they won't understand. That's rebellion enough, confined to the Senior Common Room.
That could be taken as a sign of failure, but I don't think there is an underlying project to be taken too seriously here (unlike in, for example, B.S.Johnson's books). The efforts at genre parody (hardboiled detective fiction, conspiracy thrillers) don't come off too well either, but are mercifully quite brief. Literary pornography, a fashionable topic back then, and taken more seriously than now, inspires some intriguingly dated satire. The better moments are the ones when Brophy follows the logic of the gender-amnesia device, working it through with some careful observational writing about airports as the exemplars of modern living. It also gets good again in the closing chapters, parodic of the student revolts of 1968, which the old elitist Brophy clearly thought were a lot of nonsense, and we also get an appearance by the topic of air-terrorism, which has become a larger phenomenon in the years since 1969. We end up in the same mood as Brooke-Rose's "Thru" a few years later, playing games with tradition and orthodoxy, whilst exasperated and irritated by the banality of youth's simultaneous unfocussed rebellion, with the "din of pop" that accompanies it. You can't break rules if you don't know any; clever women can scoff at the silly puffed-up men by making smart jokes they won't understand. That's rebellion enough, confined to the Senior Common Room.
August 28, 2025
A multi-layered chaos trifle of an (anti-)novel, playing with all things liminal (gender, form, airport lounge), with the story sometimes idling but other times cantering towards an epic conclusion. Brophy takes the reader along twists and turns and diversions that mirror, at least atmospherically, the sensation of being lost in an airport or lost in a body, whichever is more familiar to the reader. And from the 60s, noch! What a mind.
December 22, 2023
After finishing Gravity’s Rainbow back in October I wanted to take a bit of a break from reading Postmodern fiction. I was eager to jump back into something else in the genre but I didn’t want to move on too quickly from this monolithic book. While that is the case, I also have been excited to get into this book, In Transit, ever since I bought it last summer. I think two months was a pretty respectable layover between the two.
In Transit is a 1969 postmodern, metafictional novel written by the Irish author Brigid Brophy. I came across this book by chance looking at Open Books amazing collection of Dalkey Archive books. I bought this based on the description which highlighted a few favorite things of mine to read; 1960s Postmodern metafiction, an obscure work of mystery and intrigue, linguistics, an exploration of gender, an exploration of syntax and the written word, and a setting of an international airport. Even just two of these concepts in combination would have my interest peaked but this felt too good to be true. In the last six months since buying it, it's been on my mind in anticipation of finally reading it.
So what is In Transit? This book is split into four parts. The first part opens with our protagonist at an airport in Italy. They navigate their way to the transit lounge and Brophy does an amazing job describing this airport, painting it in ways most people would not have previously considered an airport to be.
An airport is a transitive state. No one lives at an airport and unless you work at a kiosk or gate you do not go to the same spot on a daily basis. The airport is not an end destination but a conductor from point A to B. Everyone you see at the airport is also going from one place to the next and is most likely not taking the same route as you. This state of transience and middle ground is explored further through language, which is where we get to a lot of the Postmodern writing.
Brophy utilizes the 235 pages that make up this book as a literary playground. I haven’t read a book with as great a wordplay as this since reading Rick Harsch’s The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas, and I haven’t seen a play with form and syntax like this since reading Philip Freedenberg’s America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic. Those are much more modern works so I wouldn’t compare them any further than my own reading experience but I found similar components of what I liked about the writing in those here in this book.
Brophy does a lot with syntax that I haven’t seen somewhere else. One of my favorite elements are these bracketed sections. She will enclose a segment of a sentence with brackets and give you two options to pick from for how to interpret the sentence. These are used in a variety of different ways. An early example goes as follows:
“There you are: fixed in your high (by several thousand feet) chair or wedged into your push (by jet engine) chair, dependent on h{a/u}rried n{u/a}nny’s finding a moment to play attendant to you.” -page 19.
It’s almost like Brophy is providing you with a “choose your own adventure” to complete the sentence and how you see fit to interpret it. Astute readers will take both interpretations into account but this is a smaller facet of the grander scheme of the novel. Blurring the lines between two binaries.
During this time Brophy also utilizes the setting of an international airport to explore the multilingual aspect. Pointing out signs in three different languages, she introduces you to this concept of language as having more interpretation than just what can be expressed in English. A prominent component of this is the gendered nouns of various other Latin derived languages; a hint towards what’s to come.
Part one closes with our protagonist listening to an Italian opera in the lounge waiting for their flight, contemplating the Italian meanings and how that applies to their Irish upbringing. This book helps if you are someone interested in linguistics and knowledgeable of various languages and cultures. I would particularly highlight Italian and Irish for this reason of understanding the character more so. This opera goes on for so long that our character has missed their flight and eventually comes to the realization that they don’t know what gender they are.
Parts two and three are spent following our protagonist as they try to determine what gender they are with societal signifiers but no clear conclusion is made. For a moment the character will come to one conclusion and all pronouns and language are shifted to male but then that conclusion will be dismantled by some new revelation and then everything will shift to female. This process will keep happening until no sense of confident conclusion can be made.
Switching from Pat to Patricia, our protagonist ends up in a lot of wacky scenarios. These moments feel very Pynchonian. I will remind those reading this review that this book came out four years prior to Gravity’s Rainbow. Maybe it’s just because I have read that book so recently but I was amazed by how similar it felt reading this. Pynchon had written V and The Crying of Lot 49 by this time but nothing in those books comes close to how wacky some of these scenarios feel (maybe the alligator chase scenes in V). A favorite standout moment from this section is having our Protagonist end up on the baggage conveyor belt area of the airport and coming upon the collection of workers who are all women and are referred to as the “lesbian underground”. This secret society, conspiracy also have a very Pynchon feel to it.
I reference Pynchon a lot here as he is the author of contemporary to Brophy that I’ve read the most of. I also see a lot of similarities to John Barth in the writing here, particularly in the syntax and experimentation of form.
You also can’t talk about an Irish Postmodern author without talking about Joyce. While I haven’t read any of Joyce’s wilder works yet, there is a clear connection here and In Transit is not shy from referencing that point.
Part four is dedicated to the exploration of a group of revolutionaries hijacking the airport. These revolutionaries are set on blurring the binary between masculine and feminine, a task started by following our protagonist and now implemented on a wider scale. Once again, the setting of an airport is a perfect vehicle for this narrative. Whether it be the monitors that once told departure and arrival times being used to project messages by this group or the collision of two planes as a metaphorical culmination of our two binaries being thrust together and jumbled up in the end.
Going into this book I was expecting some dated outlooks to gender considering the time period it was written in. I’m a big fan of Sci Fi and experimental literature from this time, which comes with the issue of a lot of dated outlooks on gender, sexuality, and race. Considering this factor, I was surprised how little of it felt off by today’s standards.
Granted I am not a Gender Studies expert, but I found Brophy’s outlook here to be quite modern and one akin to a lot of gender fluid and non binary perspectives we hear about today. I’m not sure how much of these ideas were explored in her time but I think this book really could do well with more people of our time reading it.
In 1969, gender roles were a lot more strict. The binary of masculine and feminine were a lot stronger and the way Brophy collides the two in this book is something to admire. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if our protagonist was male or female. As the revolutionaries in the final section proclaim “WE ARE ALL HUMAN AND HUMANS ARE ALL THOROUGHLY NICE PEOPLE”- page 231.
In our traditional society we are made to hold masculine and feminine at two polar opposite ends of the spectrum and never are they two intertwined but of course that is not reality. You don’t have to be nonbinary or gender fluid to inhabit both masculine and feminine traits. I don’t care what you say, you could be the most “masculine man” or the highest of “femme females” and you probably still exhibit some level of thought or action that could be attributed traditionally to the other end of the spectrum.
This book really upholds the “gender is a spectrum” concept and that is something I have felt long before picking up this book. It is amazing to see that idea conveyed so well here in a book from over 50 years ago. Beyond this overall theme this is just an amazingly written and constructed novel. Sure there are probably some elements that could be smoothed over and there is a lot I missed here on a first read but that is the marker of any great Postmodern work. I’ll leave this review with a section of text that really stood out to me. The double meaning of the words is something that I’ve marveled at ever since reading it and I would go so far as to say, these words are better constructed than many full novels I’ve read.
“She could see, chalked on the concrete in vast letters, two inscriptions, one on each side of the flap she was headed for.
The left read
WOMEN OF THE WORLD UNITE.
YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE
BUT YOUR LABOUR PAINS
The right complimented the doctrine with
WOMEN OF THE WORLD UNITE.
YOU HAVE EVERYTHING TO
GAIN - IN PARTICULAR,
YOUR DAISY CHAINS.” -Page 132.
In Transit is a 1969 postmodern, metafictional novel written by the Irish author Brigid Brophy. I came across this book by chance looking at Open Books amazing collection of Dalkey Archive books. I bought this based on the description which highlighted a few favorite things of mine to read; 1960s Postmodern metafiction, an obscure work of mystery and intrigue, linguistics, an exploration of gender, an exploration of syntax and the written word, and a setting of an international airport. Even just two of these concepts in combination would have my interest peaked but this felt too good to be true. In the last six months since buying it, it's been on my mind in anticipation of finally reading it.
So what is In Transit? This book is split into four parts. The first part opens with our protagonist at an airport in Italy. They navigate their way to the transit lounge and Brophy does an amazing job describing this airport, painting it in ways most people would not have previously considered an airport to be.
An airport is a transitive state. No one lives at an airport and unless you work at a kiosk or gate you do not go to the same spot on a daily basis. The airport is not an end destination but a conductor from point A to B. Everyone you see at the airport is also going from one place to the next and is most likely not taking the same route as you. This state of transience and middle ground is explored further through language, which is where we get to a lot of the Postmodern writing.
Brophy utilizes the 235 pages that make up this book as a literary playground. I haven’t read a book with as great a wordplay as this since reading Rick Harsch’s The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas, and I haven’t seen a play with form and syntax like this since reading Philip Freedenberg’s America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic. Those are much more modern works so I wouldn’t compare them any further than my own reading experience but I found similar components of what I liked about the writing in those here in this book.
Brophy does a lot with syntax that I haven’t seen somewhere else. One of my favorite elements are these bracketed sections. She will enclose a segment of a sentence with brackets and give you two options to pick from for how to interpret the sentence. These are used in a variety of different ways. An early example goes as follows:
“There you are: fixed in your high (by several thousand feet) chair or wedged into your push (by jet engine) chair, dependent on h{a/u}rried n{u/a}nny’s finding a moment to play attendant to you.” -page 19.
It’s almost like Brophy is providing you with a “choose your own adventure” to complete the sentence and how you see fit to interpret it. Astute readers will take both interpretations into account but this is a smaller facet of the grander scheme of the novel. Blurring the lines between two binaries.
During this time Brophy also utilizes the setting of an international airport to explore the multilingual aspect. Pointing out signs in three different languages, she introduces you to this concept of language as having more interpretation than just what can be expressed in English. A prominent component of this is the gendered nouns of various other Latin derived languages; a hint towards what’s to come.
Part one closes with our protagonist listening to an Italian opera in the lounge waiting for their flight, contemplating the Italian meanings and how that applies to their Irish upbringing. This book helps if you are someone interested in linguistics and knowledgeable of various languages and cultures. I would particularly highlight Italian and Irish for this reason of understanding the character more so. This opera goes on for so long that our character has missed their flight and eventually comes to the realization that they don’t know what gender they are.
Parts two and three are spent following our protagonist as they try to determine what gender they are with societal signifiers but no clear conclusion is made. For a moment the character will come to one conclusion and all pronouns and language are shifted to male but then that conclusion will be dismantled by some new revelation and then everything will shift to female. This process will keep happening until no sense of confident conclusion can be made.
Switching from Pat to Patricia, our protagonist ends up in a lot of wacky scenarios. These moments feel very Pynchonian. I will remind those reading this review that this book came out four years prior to Gravity’s Rainbow. Maybe it’s just because I have read that book so recently but I was amazed by how similar it felt reading this. Pynchon had written V and The Crying of Lot 49 by this time but nothing in those books comes close to how wacky some of these scenarios feel (maybe the alligator chase scenes in V). A favorite standout moment from this section is having our Protagonist end up on the baggage conveyor belt area of the airport and coming upon the collection of workers who are all women and are referred to as the “lesbian underground”. This secret society, conspiracy also have a very Pynchon feel to it.
I reference Pynchon a lot here as he is the author of contemporary to Brophy that I’ve read the most of. I also see a lot of similarities to John Barth in the writing here, particularly in the syntax and experimentation of form.
You also can’t talk about an Irish Postmodern author without talking about Joyce. While I haven’t read any of Joyce’s wilder works yet, there is a clear connection here and In Transit is not shy from referencing that point.
Part four is dedicated to the exploration of a group of revolutionaries hijacking the airport. These revolutionaries are set on blurring the binary between masculine and feminine, a task started by following our protagonist and now implemented on a wider scale. Once again, the setting of an airport is a perfect vehicle for this narrative. Whether it be the monitors that once told departure and arrival times being used to project messages by this group or the collision of two planes as a metaphorical culmination of our two binaries being thrust together and jumbled up in the end.
Going into this book I was expecting some dated outlooks to gender considering the time period it was written in. I’m a big fan of Sci Fi and experimental literature from this time, which comes with the issue of a lot of dated outlooks on gender, sexuality, and race. Considering this factor, I was surprised how little of it felt off by today’s standards.
Granted I am not a Gender Studies expert, but I found Brophy’s outlook here to be quite modern and one akin to a lot of gender fluid and non binary perspectives we hear about today. I’m not sure how much of these ideas were explored in her time but I think this book really could do well with more people of our time reading it.
In 1969, gender roles were a lot more strict. The binary of masculine and feminine were a lot stronger and the way Brophy collides the two in this book is something to admire. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if our protagonist was male or female. As the revolutionaries in the final section proclaim “WE ARE ALL HUMAN AND HUMANS ARE ALL THOROUGHLY NICE PEOPLE”- page 231.
In our traditional society we are made to hold masculine and feminine at two polar opposite ends of the spectrum and never are they two intertwined but of course that is not reality. You don’t have to be nonbinary or gender fluid to inhabit both masculine and feminine traits. I don’t care what you say, you could be the most “masculine man” or the highest of “femme females” and you probably still exhibit some level of thought or action that could be attributed traditionally to the other end of the spectrum.
This book really upholds the “gender is a spectrum” concept and that is something I have felt long before picking up this book. It is amazing to see that idea conveyed so well here in a book from over 50 years ago. Beyond this overall theme this is just an amazingly written and constructed novel. Sure there are probably some elements that could be smoothed over and there is a lot I missed here on a first read but that is the marker of any great Postmodern work. I’ll leave this review with a section of text that really stood out to me. The double meaning of the words is something that I’ve marveled at ever since reading it and I would go so far as to say, these words are better constructed than many full novels I’ve read.
“She could see, chalked on the concrete in vast letters, two inscriptions, one on each side of the flap she was headed for.
The left read
WOMEN OF THE WORLD UNITE.
YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE
BUT YOUR LABOUR PAINS
The right complimented the doctrine with
WOMEN OF THE WORLD UNITE.
YOU HAVE EVERYTHING TO
GAIN - IN PARTICULAR,
YOUR DAISY CHAINS.” -Page 132.
May 9, 2018
This is a kind of experimental novel where our protagonist is hanging out in an airport and comes down with 'linguistic leprousy', which means that their language gets all screwed up and they start making a lot of puns and plays on words. they also forget which gender they are and have trouble working it out. sometimes it's cool and sometimes it's kind of irritating, and i didn't really 'get' the genre pastiche parts or the section near the end where some lesbians stage a revolutionary takeover of the airport.
May 23, 2025
Fascinating read. So topical considering it was written in the 60s. At times impenetrable, nonetheless enjoyable. The language play is brilliant.
March 14, 2025
loses some steam in its final quarter but otherwise one of the richest, more interesting texts ive read in a second, definitely the greatest irish novel since ulysses. brophy is just beyond eloquent here. i found myself rereading passage after passage, partially to figure out what the wordplay and meaning actually was and partially just for the joy of seeing something so beautifully played out - for once, a book that earns its musical allegories. and rly startling how ahead of her time she was politically, sexually, how she approaches gender n sexuality as not necessarily fluid but subject to fluidity and change; and how deeper she goes than any trite statements of interpretation like what i just wrote. can go toe to toe with the best of her contemporaries
May 31, 2018
I honestly don't know what to think of this novel. It was just painfully slow with a few good puns (and a lot of mediocre ones). Most of all did the random parenthesis, capital letters, language changes, and unindicated changes of points of view/focus bother me just too much to properly enjoy the witty and interesting observations of the main character.
April 12, 2021
Hilarious and quirky and mind-bending at times. No wonder Brophy was described as the brainiest woman of her time.
October 26, 2021
kind of obsessed with the ending
September 24, 2025
right i had no fucking idea what was going on in this book most of the time but i stumbled across it in a bookshop and was fascinated by the concept so i gave it a go. In Transit is probably the most challenging book i've ever read and usually if i picked something up and found the opening sentence so hard to navigate i would just give up but i pushed myself and i ended up really enjoying it.
it took me about a month to read, at about 10 pages a day, and i was constantly having to pause and look stuff up or re-read passages or read them out loud so i could actually get a grasp on what Brophy was trying to say. so all in all a very very challenging book, and not one i think i could describe a single aspect of the plot of, but i had a lot of fun reading it and am feeling more encouraged now to tackle things that are tough but will (hopefully) expand my brain!
it took me about a month to read, at about 10 pages a day, and i was constantly having to pause and look stuff up or re-read passages or read them out loud so i could actually get a grasp on what Brophy was trying to say. so all in all a very very challenging book, and not one i think i could describe a single aspect of the plot of, but i had a lot of fun reading it and am feeling more encouraged now to tackle things that are tough but will (hopefully) expand my brain!
October 5, 2022
I bloody loved it and good thing I did because I wrote my final exam on it. It's absolutely bonkers but in a way that's SO fun with all the little plays on words, juggling with genre, and transgressing gender boundaries in every possible sense. One day I'll reread it without a deadline and then I'll try to find all the little clues, references, and puns hidden in there.
May 19, 2016
I wonder if SNL's androgynous skit staring "Pat" might have been nicely lifted from this zany cut-up of a meta this meta that skirmish of a what? Fun jibber-jabber reading, puny mish-mash who-dun-it squabbled rot! I'm out.
July 28, 2025
First anti-novel I’ve ever read which was fun! Turns out it’s not for me but the matters covered within the book are incredibly interesting and relevant even 50+ years later.
A bit of a nightmare to string together some of it but we move.
A bit of a nightmare to string together some of it but we move.
June 29, 2019
Probably quite prophetic in its own way.
September 12, 2016
Cyborg seduction manual.
June 8, 2025
equal parts linguistically suffocating and liberatingly camp
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