The problem is in the pronoun. How to refer to a woman who effectively turns into a man? She? He? S/he? Collis handles the issue briskly. As soon as Valerie Pearce Crouch leaves her husband and son, crosses the threshold of the Grand Hotel, Brighton, and, in an epiphanous moment, registers as Col Sir Victor Barker DSO, "she" becomes "he", and remains so.
It sounds like not-very-good fantasy, but it's a true bill, from the first half of the last century.
Both of Valerie's marriages had been unsatisfactory, albeit she gave birth to a son and a daughter. So she resolved that, as a man, she would go one better and excel either of her husbands as "a gentleman, a hard worker, a real war hero, and the sort of father a son could look up to". She adopted the masculine clothing she felt most comfortable in, cropped and slicked back her hair, bound up her bosoms and embarked on macho activities such as coaching young boys in boxing. The transformation convinced a lot of people at the time, which is odd, because from her photographs, in male attire, the face comes across as undeniably feminine.
As a respectable middle-class, albeit unhappily married, woman, Valerie had a pal called Elfrida whom she visited regularly, woman to woman. But then what did Valerie go and do with Elfrida? Reader, she married her. (And indeed later took a second woman to wife.)
"Even though I had known her as a woman, it was easy to accept her statement that she was a man," Elfrida vouchsafed. "Everything about her suggested that she was really a man. Her figure, manner, handwriting, interests, every conceivable thing was masculine." Except, of course, for the equipment that conceives.
But if one may be so bold: what about the, er, wedding-tackle business? Apparently it was either a matter of prostheses or else the marriages were blancs. This seems to suggest that, in switching sex, Valerie/Victor also turned from a person of respectable standards to one of dubious morality, but no analysis of this is attempted.
It is not difficult to treat the subject of this unusual book with some levity, especially since Valerie/Victor managed to get through life without too much angst; a little petty theft here, a spot of bankruptcy there, a morceau of gender-bending perjury on marriage certificates, leading to brief prison sentences.
However, the fact that Collis has written two books already on celebrated lesbians, journalist Nancy Spain and singer k.d. lang, seems to point to some kind of feminist agenda. To no apparent purpose she bulks out her narrative of Valerie/Victor with accounts of other transsexual women through the ages. These seem, frankly, to be mere padding. If agenda it be, it remains obscure. Unlike the colonel, who was a fruitful source of sensation for the yellow press of the day, biological females seeking to pass as males today are just part of the scenery, regarded with such indifference by the citizenry that they are no more noticeable than anybody else.
For most readers, then, this book will be an entertaining just-fancy-that read, no more.
Godfrey Fitzsimons is an Irish Times journalist