In transit

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.