The Peppered Moth [Hardcover]

Margaret Drabble (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 10, 2001

Bessie Bawtry is a young girl living in the early 1900s in Breaseborough, a mining town in South Yorkshire, England. Unusually gifted, she longs to escape a life burdened by unquestioned tradition. She studies patiently, dreaming of the day when she will take the entrance exam for Cambridge and be able to leave her narrow world. A generation later, Bessie's daughter Chrissie feels a similar impulse to expand her horizons, which she in turn passes on to her own daughter.

Nearly a century later, Bessie's granddaughter, Faro Gaulden, finds herself listening to a lecture on genetics and biological determinism. She has returned to Breaseborough and wonders at the families who remained in the humble little town where Bessie grew up. Confronted with what would have been her life had her grandmother stayed, she finds herself faced with difficult questions. Is she really so different from the plain South Yorkshire locals? As she soon learns, the past has a way of reasserting itself-not unlike the peppered moth that was once thought to be nearing extinction but is now enjoying a sudden unexplained resurgence.

The Peppered Moth is a brilliantly conceived novel, full of irony, sadness, and humor.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In The Peppered Moth, Margaret Drabble chronicles four generations in the life of a family, homing in on the female line and attempting to explain how genes, DNA, and environment can change or challenge an individual. The tale begins with Bessie Bawtry, a gifted young woman from a South Yorkshire mining town who fails to live up to her promise. It ends with her granddaughter, Faro Gaulden, "a bobby dazzler" radiant with opportunities and ideas, who nonetheless can't quite make the most of what she has. All of this would produce a fairly straightforward and enjoyable tale of family life--and inherited characteristics--but for Drabble's tone, which is, frankly, uneasy. It wavers from the clinical voice-over ("We must try to rediscover the long-ago infant in her vanished world") to the mawkish elegy ("O poor young girls in flower, you poor frail darlings, who will watch over you, who will guide and protect you?").

What happened? Drabble's afterword, in fact, explains a great deal of this waywardness. Bessie Bawtry, with her hard-won education, her relinquishing lapses into illness, and her life of deferred pleasures, is based on the author's mother. Consequently, there is the sense of filling in biographical gaps with fictional plots and characters, and then carefully plastering everything into place with a thin layer of scientific metaphor. Drabble, alas, is too personally involved with this material, and her prose suffers. It juts and jars at awkward angles, reducing The Peppered Moth to a gawky adolescent of a book instead of a mature, measured reflection on family history. --Eithne Farry

From Publishers Weekly

One scarcely recognizes Drabble's (The Witch of Exmoor, etc.) customary satirical verve in this thinly veiled fictional account of her mother's life. According to the author's afterword, it was painful to write; moreover, it's painful to read. The essential unlovability of the central character is accentuated by Drabble's tone throughout, which she admits is "harsh, dismissive, censorious. As she was." The fictional Bessie Bawtry is born in a Yorkshire coal-mining town during the early years of the 20th century. From childhood on, she is precociously intelligent and fastidious, carping and contemptuous. A manipulative martyr, Bessie is determined to escape her dowdy family and dismal surroundings, but though she wins a scholarship to Cambridge, her ignominious return to her hometown after graduation can be lived down only by marriage to affable Joe Barron. Forever dissatisfied, Bessie thereafter uses her caustic tongue to inflict her bitterness and resentment on her husband and children. Drabble animates the narrative somewhat through Bessie's daughter, Crissie, who manages to surmount her own dreadful marriage, and Bessie's granddaughter, journalist Faro Gaulden. Readers accustomed to Drabble's trenchant commentary on social conditions will welcome her interpolations on anthropological theories, gene research and social migration, all of which add depth to the story. At least one scene, of a funeral attended by the deceased's two wives, five mistresses and many offspring, legitimate and otherwise, represents Drabble at her best. But an author must have some sympathy for her protagonist, and Drabble seems to have none for Bessie. Her statement, again in the afterword: "I feel, in writing this, that I have made myself smell of dead rat" says it all. 3-city author tour. (Apr.) Forecast: Readers looking for insight into Drabble's background, and that of her sister, novelist A.S. Byatt, will find this book interesting and illuminating, but most of her fans won't be pleased with this outing, which should dampen sales.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First edition. edition (April 10, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151005214
• ISBN-13: 978-0151005215
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,727,209 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Margaret Drabble is the author of The Sea Lady, The Seven Sisters, The Peppered Moth, and The Needle's Eye, among other novels. She has written biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson, and she is the editor of the fifth and sixth editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. For her contributions to contemporary English literature, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2008.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The ash of an apologia, July 20, 2001

By 

Charles Slovenski (Geneva Switzerland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Peppered Moth (Hardcover)

At the back of the book Margaret Drabble gives her apologia for writing THE PEPPERED MOTH. She explains that while writing it she thought mostly of her mother and in what ways the character of Bessie is and is not like her. This is interesting in the same way that gossip is interesting: it's unnecessary but somehow vital.

Apart from the apologia, the novel stands on its own. The story concentrates on a Yorkshire community which is presently being traced back to its origins. All kinds of contemporary images are placed against antique ones: DNA samples, a lecture on heredity, environmentalists, journalists, and computer specialists lie in answer to the ash of a turn-of-the-century mining town, Cambridge, poverty, new and inherited wealth and prickly class differences. An environmentalist discovers an ancient corpse believed to be the oldest thread of this community. Through several generations the lives, loves and relations of four women are traced. The story may wander and the reader may be in danger of getting lost in the details but it never flags. Perhaps too many sociological issues are brought into play but the attempt to link the past to the present, and the present to the past, keeps this novel moving.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mixed Success, April 2, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Peppered Moth (Hardcover)

We have seen a version of the difficult mother character Drabble executes here in "Jerusalem the Golden." In the end, I think it's better to either do a straight memoir, implying, This is my opinion, take it or leave it, or to write a mother in as an influence on the main character, as was successfully done in "Jerusalem."

During the first half of this book, when the author focuses on trying to tell the story of the mother, Bessie, this brilliant author's fictional voice fails her. There is none of the stream of consciousness intimacy, the being in the moment textured detail that make Drabble's works so rich and pleasurable. She simply could not seem to get in into Bessie's head, and her story is told sternly from the outside. The book picks up noticably mid-way, around the 160s, when the point of view is almost fully shifted to Bessie's daughter, Chrissie, who rebelled against her dour mother and got entangled in the excesses of the 1960s, and her daughter, Bessie's grandaughter, Faro, who represents, rather baldly, continuation of the female line.

I found myself wanting to know in even more depth about Chrissie's melodramatic life. Through her eyes, we get a better sense of Bessie's than in the narrative the preceded it. Chrissie being of Drabble's generation, she comes alive most. While Faro is perfectly pleasant, again, I felt the author didn't try hard enough to imagine her. It's almost as if people like Chrissie, who inflicted the chaos of the hippie generation (although here it was less Chrissie's fault than her philandering husband's)on their children, need to tell themselves that their kids are O.K., when they're clearly not. From the time frame, Faro is pushing 40, yet seems to still be inexplicably caught in unhealthy relating patterns with men. Where are the influences, the anger, the confused but I'm sure intense feelings about the much loved but deadbeat father? When Drabble was a young writer, she used to present the inner lives of such young characters with such breathtaking reality. Being of Faro's generation, I just felt the author didn't do her justice. For example, anyone who hadn't learned to discard leeches like the Sebastien character by the end of her student years must have serious developmental problems. In other ways, Faro seemed too smart for this kind of masochistic passivity. She hooks up with a better man toward the end, by why suddenly now? It's all a bit too neat, and doesn't come out of any discernable character change.

That said, once we're in mid-stream, the book really does revert in many ways to the high quality of much of Drabble's previous fiction -- the attention to detail, the moment by moment reckonings between the present and the past. I especially enjoyed Nick Gaulden's funeral, with all the ex-wives, girlfriends and offspring. But again, Faro couldn't have been as unaffected as the author depicts her by this complicated family situation.

If you can get through the first half of the book, the second half is worthwhile.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Those Who Go and Those Who Stay, May 5, 2001

By 

WifeofBath3 (Hattiesburg, Mississippi United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Peppered Moth (Hardcover)

The Peppered Moth is oddly told and while it contained enough narrative pull to keep me reading until the end, it did not contain enough to keep me compulsively reading late into the night. This may be so in part because the story of Bessie peters out after her early college days, reviving only briefly for the War and again for the few days before her death; Bessie was an unlikable character, but I would still have liked to get inside her mind as a woman sunk in disappointment, bitterness, hypochondria, and contempt as Drabble allowed us to do when Bessie was younger and still hopeful.

Fault may lie in the manner of Drabble's telling. The book bounces back and forth in time. Authorial comments abound, commenting on a character or event we've met already or that is yet to come or worse, calling attention to the narrative or its author with comments on, for example, whether a character has been described much or whether a character has been treated fairly. These asides to the reader have some appeal, but ultimately they add little to the book and can, moreover, pall a bit.

But there are good things. Drabble gives us several interesting women and wanting to know more about them, while frustrating, is not necessarily an indicator of bad writing. (If Drabble were a really bad writer, we wouldn't care enough to want to know more about her characters.) Having Bessie be a bright young thing who fails makes a change from the more common story of the bright young thing who succeeds. The industrial North of England makes a fine setting for much of the book, and it is nice to see science (genetics and evolution) used in a book, even one that is not about science per se. One occasionally sees some generational differences among grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter that suggests the social history of England over a whole century.

Best of all are the musings on Those Who Go and Those Who Stay. Why does a family stay in one spot for generation after generation, only to suddenly produce a child who must leave? Why does the same family produce one sibling who is happy to stay and one who feels he will die if he does not get away? Why do some families move about and others stay put? Why do some people feel the pull of a well-known home with all its ties and others prefer the anonymity of hotels and airports? Drabble doesn't answer any of these questions but her raising them is enough. The reader will be thinking about them for a while.