In many ways, Paula Backscheider has written a highly appropriate life of Defoe. Fat, fact-filled and repetitious, her book offers a meandering narrative of merchant adventures and spying, opportunism and piety, taking us from fire and plague to bankruptcy via the battlefield of Sedgemoor, Newgate prison and the pillory. It is, in other words, much like a novel by Defoe. The one essential difference is that at the heart of all Defoe's novels there is a voice, the beguilingly candid tones of a first-person narrator skilfully blending puritan confessional with con-man's patter to impose a rhetorical identity upon the turmoil of events. It is not merely that Professor Backscheider's book inevitably lacks the strong dramatic unison of such an autobiographical persona. More disappointingly, she seems uncomfortable describing, or attempting to account for, the virtuoso feats of moral and political ventriloquism which render Defoe's true 'identity' a reverberating compromise between rhetorical fantasy and documentary fact.

LRB 19 April 1990 | PDF Download