Book review: Sophie and the Sibyl - George Eliot in madcap comedy of manners
Patricia Duncker's Sibyl is George Eliot, but this is far from a straightforward trot through the English novelist's golden years as an international literary celebrity.
by Patricia Duncker
Bloomsbury
Patricia Duncker's Sibyl is George Eliot, but this is far from a straightforward trot through the English novelist's golden years as an international literary celebrity.
Curiously enough, Eliot's German publishers were called Duncker Verlag, and from the coincidence of the shared surname, Duncker has concocted a madcap comedy of manners concerning the romance of Max Duncker, junior in the firm, and his headstrong childhood sweetheart, Sophie.
But the official plot is only one strand, and everywhere Duncker draws attention to the fictionality of her book. The postmodern fun begins with the three epigraphs, two genuine (at least I assume so), and the last purporting to be from the narrator, commenting on Duncker herself: "Her vindictive little game is undermined by love."
What is her game, exactly? Partly to bring Eliot down to a manageable size, to poke gentle fun, even to criticise. But Duncker is also wittily critiquing the conventions of the historical novel, and for this she takes as her model John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, which she calls a "powerfully awful tale" narrated by "a pompous sexual know-all" who is "a thinly veiled version of Fowles himself".
Duncker is not going to fall into that trap: even her narrator is fictional, "a sceptical young woman of Sophie's age" (from the afterword).