In Transit
Brigid Brophy
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From the publisher
Foreword by Kate Levey, Afterword by Arwa F. Al-Mubaddel
It’s easy to forget things when you go to the airport.
Including your sex.
"Was I, perhaps, castrato/a? Was the truth behind my oblivion that I had no sex?"
At the airport, Pat – an Anglo-Irish character of undetermined gender at the heart of In Transit – is called to a heroic quest. Adrift within the confines of the airport’s physical space and time zones, they undergo a journey of self-discovery that embraces tangents, digressions, and undecidability.
As supersonic Concordes soar in the skies outside, inside the airport Pat is uprooted: they savour a trendy cappuccino, walk through magazine stalls, engross themselves in the operatic melodies at the airline lounge.
They hop on a baggage conveyor leading to an underground feminist movement, engage in a lively trivia game show and witness the sparks of a socialist revolution.
After they become a character in an erotic thriller and detective novel, Pat encounters death, and emerges reborn—all while navigating sudden shifts in gender due to the onset of ‘sexual amnesia’.
Brophy’s experimental non-binary 1969 anti-novel was decades ahead of its time. At once a refusal to be identified, and irreverent celebration of identity's undoing.
‘Brigid Brophy’s “brilliant apostrophe” fizzes with (re)invention of language, gender and convention. As unairport as a novel can get, In Transit will make your mind soar.’ So Mayer, author of Truth or Dare
‘By turns, surreally digressive, puckishly droll, and knowingly arch, In Transit’s camp airport-based comedy delights with its Joycean wordplay in a gender-swapping romp that contains metafictional shades of Sterne, Wilde and Woolf. The hero/heroine’s navigation of perplexing linguistic and ideological terrains in search of an increasingly-fugitive gender identity, sees Brophy ebulliently debunking moral dogma and literary conventions in a spryly experimental anti-novel that has lost none of its intellectual effervescence and relevance for a twenty-first century readership.’ Carole-Anne Sweeney, author of Vagabond Fictions: Gender and Experiment in British Women’s Writing, 1945-1970
‘A “sewn up détour” de force (warning: you have to like puns), in which wit and wordplay herald a queer unravelling. Language - and opera, and many other things - are ungendered into chaos in this tale of nonbinary panic at the airport: miss your flight and hang on for the ride.’ Nat Reeve, author of Nettleblack.