Customer Reviews

The Peppered Moth

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Thirty years ago a friend who taught English Lit at a Catholic women's college in the Boston suburbs opined that Margaret Drabble was the best novelist then writing in the English language! "The Needle's Eye" and "The Realms of Gold" failed to convice me of the validity of his assessment then and "The Peppered Moth" does nothing to convince me now. In the early days of feminism, Drabble did write interestingly about young well-educated British women struggling to find self-realization. The early portion of the "Peppered Moth" led me to think that she might be tackling more universal themes these days: free will vs predestination or heredity vs environment. Alas, that turned out to be only window-dressing for an even narrower focus -- Drabble's relationship with her own mother.

The story opens in the chapel of a Midlands mining town where a DNA researcher is collecting samples from a large group of Cudworth family members whose ancestral roots are in the grimy coal towns of southern Yorkshire. His purpose is to establish whether any of them are matrilineal descendants of a 9,000 year old skeleton found in a cave nearby. This is a thinly-camouflaged retelling of the discovery by DNA researchers that a history teacher in Somerset is a direct descendant of a neolithic skeleton found a few miles away in the Cheddar Gorge.

Faro Gaulden, great granddaughter of Ellen Cudworth Bawtry, attends that meeting to contribute her DNA sample and to write about the project for the magazine that employs her. Faro's grandmother, Bessie Bawtry Barron, escaped from the coal dust by winning a scholarship to Cambridge University. Bessie is the most carefully drawn character in the book and, undoubtedly, is the "peppered moth" of the title. Drabble tells us that Peppered Moths are poster insects for modern Darwinians. In Britain's industrial Midlands the moth has evolved a darker coloration to match its sooty environment than have its cousins in less polluted southern counties. Bessie marries another university-educated refugee from the coal towns who becomes a prosperous barrister. But they do not live happily ever after. Her daughter, Chrissie, who is Faro's mother, is the fictional stand-in for Drabble, herself.

With genetic DNA and Darwinian adaptation looming over things, one expects startling disclosures and the clash of profound ideas. Instead we are asked to witness a posthumous family squabble. Dora, Bessie's sister, is also fully realized, but the other characters are unplausible cardboard cutouts. I was also put off by Drabble's authorial intrusions into the narrative, but I enjoyed the way she still plays with language.

"This is a novel about my mother," Margaret Drabble discloses in a disarming afterword. To the unprepared, this might come as a bit of a surprise; the foregoing tale has such a detached and almost callous stance that it's sometimes hard to believe that the main character is important at all to Drabble's life. In fiction as in life, the woman linked to Drabble biologically (and she makes a point of this connection) nearly escapes both the author's empathy and reader's imagination.

Intelligent and likeable as a teenager and then as a college student, Bessie Bawtry marries a childhood friend, Joe Barron, and the transition from independent woman to stay-at-home housewife and mother turns her into a bit of a tyrant. Drabble competently depicts Bessie's self-absorption, inexplicable tantrums, hypochondria, and abusive streaks; Bessie is depicted as a victim of the struggle between matriarchy and patriarchy. Bessie's daughter, Chrissie, sets out on a similar early path: "She went to an ancient university because that's what she was programmed to do. She didn't know it yet, but she was programmed to follow in her parents' footsteps." Chrissie is raised in a different, more progressive era, however, and she is able to avoid her mother's trajectory. Chrissie's relative success is social Darwinism informed by Bessie's mutation.

Drabble makes much of this genetic connection; the book is "peppered" with references to Lamarckian evolution and the politics of archaeological digs. But the subject fails her as a metaphor, and there are more than a few instances where she gets the science spectacularly wrong. A silent character throughout the novel is Cotterhall Man, a prehistoric skeleton who, through the use of DNA testing, proves to be related to the local residents (obviously inspired by the real-life Cheddar Man, who became a media sensation in England for his Stone Age genes). Eventually Faro, Bessie's granddaughter, is informed by a world-famous geneticist (and here it's hard not to imagine Bryan Sykes) that she "is indeed a direct descendant of Cotterhall Man, as were Ellen Bawtry, Bessie Barron and Chrissie Sinclair before her." Yet, as Drabble notes elsewhere, mitochondrial DNA is matrilineal; since it is carried from mothers (not fathers) to their offspring, the three modern-day women are not necessarily descended from Cotterhall Man, but rather from his mother (and, since this is a story about mothers, Drabble misses a thematic bulls-eye here).

Novelists are famous for botching up science, however; even though she makes such a fuss over her characters' genetic heritage, one could forgive Drabble her lapses in this area. But even her prose style is eerily remote; her unadorned, uniformly patterned, primer-perfect sentences are oddly textbookish. Although she's clearly trying to write about (and understand) her mother from a remove, as if through a microscope, the reader can't help but feel that Bessie is a case study examined by an anthropologist rather than a character conjured by a novelist.

What's agonizing about the thematic and stylistic blemishes is that they distract from an otherwise fascinating family chronicle. Peeking at Bessie's adulthood is distressingly like watching the aftermath of a train wreck; one is simultaneously fascinated and appalled by Drabble's scrutiny of her mother, and both Chrissie and Faro, as well as Bessie's sister, lead equally intriguing (and certainly more satisfying) lives. From beneath the scientific trappings, a potentially great novel is struggling to escape, and I ended the book unmoved, yet wanting to know more about these women.

It's been a few months since I read the Peppered Moth, but I still think about this book. I've always been a Drabble fan and believe that this book, though not well received in the U.S., is her magnum opus. I found the truths in this book to be universal--and reading about Bessie illuminated the life of my great aunts and grandmother, Jewish women from Poland. While their experience may seem unlike Bessie's, I felt that Drabble spoke to the experience of educated women born at the beginning of the 20th century--those women who did not have it in them to battle the conventions which constrained them. While so many reviewers spoke of Drabble's disdain for the character based on her mother (disdain which comes through clearly in her earlier novels), I felt that through her exploration of her mother's world (or the "nurture" part of this nature/nurture equation), the book provides a realistic yet loving (or perhaps more forgiving) portrait. Like other readers, I found it refreshing to once again encounter Drabble's intelligent voice.

"The Peppered Moth" is the eighty-year saga of an English family, told through the relationships among the women of the family. It chronicles the youth, education, marriages, dreams, triumphs, and failures of Bessie Bawtry, her daughter Chrissie, and Chrissie's daughter Faro. Along the way, it addresses concerns of heredity and predestination, most notably the question of whether our destiny and ultimate happiness are determined by the lives of our parents.

This book suffers from many failings. Most glaringly, the everpresent authorial voice alternates between preaching to the characters and bemoaning their (not altogether dreadful) fate. The discussions of heredity and destiny are just that: discussions, in which the author tells us what we should glean from the story rather than letting the narrative speak for itself.

When she isn't lecturing, Drabble isn't a bad writer: she manages to construct a coherent story that spans nearly a century and encompasses over 300 pages without seeming excessive. But she isn't a great writer either. Her prose is serviceable but not notable, and the book is rarely engrossing for more than five or ten pages at a time. It seems to be designed for slow, measured reading and consideration - an approach, like the author's heavy-handedness, not altogether compatible with the novel form.

"The Peppered Moth" is an interesting book. It raises issues that are worth considering, and it raises them through a panoramic view of mother-daughter relations that might be breathtaking if Drabble gave us room to breathe. It could be a thought-provoking read for a woman trying to come to grips with her own maternal lineage. But it isn't a fun book, and as a novel (which must entertain its readers, or else offer something dazzling in the way of insight) it ultimately fails.

Margaret Drabble's multigenerational tale points out the astonishing changes that the twentieth century wrought on the physical and mental landscape of England. Industries rise and fall, slag heaps are replaced by parkland and wreak firy revenge, families that were rooted in one place for thousands of years effervesce into intellectual and social freedom. Some people can't make it. Bessie, based on Drabble's (and A.S. Byatt's) own mother, weighs down the narrative and her family with a loss of nerve that turns a talented young woman into a self-centered black hole sucking energy from all around her.

The book is uneven -- Bessie's shadow is large and dark -- but I found the writing tighter than in some recent Drabble novels. As a near contemporary of Drabble's, raised in the industrial North and educated in the effete South of England, I was convinced by the characters and the settings. More importantly, a week after finishing the book, I am still finding myself reflecting on families and our heredity of DNA, culture and environment.

What a great book! This is the third novel I have read by Drabble, and I am convinced that she is one of the greatest living writers today. When I bought this, I was skeptical because I saw that it was heavy on the narration, with very little dialogue, and the story jumps around between three generations, not told in a linear fashion. But as I started to read, the story effortlessly unfolded before me, like the book was reading itself. I found nothing forced, nothing out of place. Drabble's use of language and deft handling of the multi-generational story is masterful. Unlike other reviewers here, I was unaware that this book had anything to do with Drabble's personal life until I read the epilogue, so I was unencumbered by any such considerations. While this may not be the novel to start with if you have never read Drabble before, it is a must read for any Drabble fan.

Margaret Drabble's The Peppered Moth is a fascinating exploration of family, heredity, genetics, and the history that links family members.

In the beginning, we meet a group of people interested in learning about their heritage. A scientist heads up the meeting, and is prepared to take DNA samples of the various participants.

We then move back and forth, between the past and present, exploring the primary characters from their childhoods to adulthood...and beyond.

Bessie Bawtry escaped her ordinary background--for a time, anyway--when she earned a Cambridge scholarship. She struggles to free herself from the family she left behind. However, she does end up marrying her hometown boyfriend Joe Barron. The reader has to wonder about this choice...is she really trying to escape her beginnings? And will she escape her family history or is she destined to repeat it?

After their marriage, her husband goes to war, leaving her to care for their two children all alone. When he returns, their differences become very apparent. Their troubled marriage must make each of them wonder about their choices.

Years later, though, their granddaughter Faro Gaulden, is amongst those seeking answers to their heritage. It would seem that things have come full circle, as she is trying to understand the very issues that plagued her grandmother. And she, too, struggles with choices that seemingly fly in the face of what she needs.

As I read this tale, I sometimes found myself bogged down...even confused, at times; sometimes the details bored me, as I wondered what was the point of it all.

But then toward the end, I regained my interest and the story moved more smoothly. Even the book's title made sense at one point, as one of the characters has an "internal monologue" about a moth species that has "darkened" with mutations; the "peppered moth"--almost an analogy for the genetic programming of the human characters.

Despite the fact that the book seemed to "drag" for me, at times, it was definitely a worthwhile read, which is why I'm granting it 4 stars. Probably 4.5.