Metafiction, freedom, self, identity
Layered, academic, supposedly new source material with previously unmentioned detail about Jack Shepherd (real 18thC thief who's life 'The Beggar's Opera' was based upon)....so layers are foundation of real historical person/events/setting, fictional introduction of new info about real person, linking and parallels drawn to fictional professor who has discovered this new source material and writes the outer story and academic footnotes, all found within novel by author who we can see as the real life version of the fictitious academic.

Identity presented and discussed through gender, sexuality, social position, ownership, apprenticeship, slavery and race. Identity needs to be seen and acknowledged, a person needs to be visible and self-determined. Freedom, recognition, love and morality are all difficult to gain and maintain - quest to maintain these seems to take precedence over action points involving Thief Master General Wild, but then we see that this character examplifies colonialism, commerce/economics and the creation of a powerful militarised policing force which are all very much part of the main thrust of this exploratory tale.

Difficult but potentially important novel, shining light upon an alternative, racially diverse, non cis/hetero-normative vein of historical knowledge which has not been much investigated or acknowledged before now. Questions authenticity, exclusivity of stories widely told, continuing oppression of cis white male master class (HIStory), Rosenberg cleverly weaves layers of reality, potential and omission within both fact and fiction and invites the reader to question much of the foundation of society.

Interesting, entertaining, skillfully woven piece of work which asks us to rexamine history as we know it and further consider the concept of collective history and reinsertion of a group of people whose existence has suffered from erasure (both trans & poc)

Actual rating 3.5

Confessions of the Fox is a reimagining of the legend of Jack Sheppard, a thief and gaol-breaker of the early 18th century in London, in which Jack is a trans man. It is told in the form of an authentic manuscript, found by Professor Voth, whose annotations of the manuscript in themselves tell a parallel story.

To be honest, I found it a little hard to get into the manuscript story. Mostly because it's written to emulate actual 18th-century writing and I find that hard to read in general, but also because, until about 65-70 pages to go, there's not much action really happening in it (defining action as adventure! explosions! risk of death! those kinds of things). On the other hand, I got really quickly into Professor Voth's story told in his footnotes. Which was kind of a problem, because that was a much more minor part of the book than the manuscript. But overall, the story was definitely good, just not really great until the last part (although there was a good bit in the middle which was absolutely Chaotic in both the manuscript and footnotes so).

Pretty central to Jack's story is his relationship with Bess, but I felt like I didn't get enough of a development of that in the manuscript. I realise it's not in first person so couldn't really give an insight into his feelings (although it's kind of an omniscient third person so did actually do insights from time to time - it also had multiple POVs/focuses which was a bit strange given that it was supposed to be Jack's confessions, and it's not really explained, but for a (potentially paranoid or obsessive) conjecture near the end, but anyway), but the relationship happens fairly rapidly. Like, we're told they mean a lot to each other but it doesn't always feel like there's a lot in the text to back that up. But that may have actually been a byproduct of the writing style. Who knows.

I have to confess, finally, that I was getting a little bored around the 70% mark, because it is a bit of a slow story - the real action comes in the last 20%, although the action in Voth's story is enough to keep you reading if just to know what happens next in that. It's also fairly ambiguous how Voth's story ends (or at least I found it to be) - is he just paranoid and obsessed with the manuscript, or is there really a mysterious group of people sitting outside of time?

And, to preempt anyone looking up Jack Sheppard and seeing his fate, this book does have a happy ending.

This is a fundamentally odd book, and as such, extremely difficult to review.

The first thing that you notice about it is the style -- or rather, the structure. It's presented as a manuscript discovered by an academic, who is now editing it and sharing it with the world -- not an unfamiliar premise, but handled here in a way I've never seen before. Instead of this simply lending an air of antiquity to the story, it's an integral part of it. The bulk of the narrative is told in a faux 18th-century style, which takes a bit of getting used to, but it's littered with footnotes. Some are just explanations of words and phrases, some are series academic comments and references to real academic books, and some are long digressions about the present-day life of the 'author' editing it.

These footnotes were a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, I've never seen a novel that made so much reference to real academia and concepts within it, and I found that a really interesting approach that helped maintain the blurring of history and fiction found within the text. On the other hand, I occasionally found the long digressions distracting, not least because reading on Kindle meant I had to leave the main text in order to read them. I think they'd have been more enjoyable in a paper copy (I'm a fan of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, after all, so long footnotes are definitely not a deal-breaker), but they were a little frustrating at times on Kindle.

The style, as I mentioned, takes a lot of getting used to, but once I adjusted I found it fairly enjoyable, even if having to click the footnotes for each bit of slang and thieves' cant got somewhat tiresome. (Again: paper copy would've been fine, but Kindle wasn't the right medium for this book).

I also really enjoyed that this was a work of historical fiction about a trans character, whose identity as a trans man was both integral to the story and, at the same time, not what the story was about. The authorial voice -- the academic editing this 'manuscript' -- is also a trans man, and the dual perspective on these experiences was extremely effective. I have no idea how realistic Jack Sheppard's experiences were for the time period, but I didn't really care, because it's so rare to see a historical character presented as trans, not as cross-dressing or erased altogether.

However, one issue of personal taste made the book difficult for me to enjoy, which is that there's just way too much sex, and while it's mostly told through a faux-historical style that makes it seems lightly less explicit, if I never have to see the word 'quim' again it'll be too soon. I know some people don't have a problem with lots of sex scenes and that's totally fine, and I also know there's a shortage of trans characters with fulfilling sex lives out there in the world of fiction, but it wasn't too my taste, because as you all probably know, I'm not super interested in sex and it mostly just tends to weird me out.

Since this aspect of the book is present from the very beginning, it also contributed to the difficulty I had getting into it at first, but I'd say that was definitely more stylistic. It rewards perserverance, though -- once I settled into the style, I was extremely invested in the storyline, often wondering about it in the gaps between reading, and although I was reading it while extremely busy, I still kept making time to read a little bit more (and stayed up too late a couple of times).

Like I said: it's an odd book, not least because of the academic way it's presented, and the use of bibliographic references to what I assume are real books (there's a full bibliography at the back). But it's certainly engaging and kept me interested, even when aspects of it weren't to my taste.

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This review is on Goodreads, and a similar/improved version will probably be posted to my blog in the near future, once I get things up and running again.

Confessions of the Fox is a transformative, metafictional piece of historical fiction that takes the life of Jack Sheppard—infamous thief and gaol-breaker who provided inspiration for John Gay's The Beggar's Opera—and tells it afresh through a mysterious manuscript. A precarious professor, V. Roth, discovers a manuscript in a university clear out. The manuscript tells the story of Jack Sheppard, a transgender man indentured to a carpenter who turns thief and prison-breaker, and his love Bess Khan, who escaped the draining of the fenlands. Together they fight to uncover a strange secret that leads back to Jonathan Wild, Thief-Catcher General. However, the manuscript may not be as first appears, or so Roth seems to think through footnotes that lead the reader on another quest altogether, one that considers freedom, gender, and the archival text.

The novel blends a kind of eighteenth-century style—full of bawdy slang and thieves' cant—with academic footnotes and personal reflection. Rosenberg's Sheppard is a man motivated by love and freedom, in contrast to Roth, who talks of a lost ex and imprisonment within a corporate university system. And yet, Roth identifies with Sheppard, and the action of identifying with a subject of research becomes something else fictionalised within the novel.

Rosenberg's novel is a difficult one to categorise. On the one hand, it is powerful historical fiction that carves a non-white, non-cis space in a certain point in eighteenth-century history. On the other, it is a postmodern consideration of oppression, theory, the archive, and what authenticity could possibly be. Within both of these strands, Confessions of the Fox fights for the untold story, for over throwing the masters, and for telling diverse stories for the people who have been left out of them. It is an exciting, powerful, postmodern book that forces the reader to look beyond its pages, but also keeping an adventure story of crime and love at its heart.