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It would be 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 cod nature documentary voice-over of "we must try to rediscover the long-ago infant in her vanished world" to the embarrassingly elegiac "o poor young girls in flower, you poor frail darlings, who will watch over you, who will guide and protect you?"
The afterword goes a long way to explaining this waywardness. Bessie Bawtry, with her hard-won education, her relinquishing lapses into illness, her life of continually deferred pleasures, is based on Drabble's mother, and Bessie's marriage to kindly Joe Barron, and his "lifetime of tragic appeasement", is the fictionalised account of her parent's relationship, in all its bitter tensions. Consequently, there is the sense of filling in biographical gaps with fictional plots and characters, and then carefully spreading thin scientific metaphor over the whole to smooth everything out nicely. Unfortunately it doesn't work; Drabble is too personally involved and her prose suffers for it. It juts and jars at awkward angles, a gawky adolescent of a book rather than a mature, measured reflection on the consequences of family history. --Eithne Farry --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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At its base, this novel is simply a traditional generational epic with the DNA debate stuck uncomfortably on top. A case of trying to make the family saga more relevent in our genetic engineering age.
The peppered moth of the title refers to the moth which seemed to grow darker as pollution in the industrial north of England darkened its surroundings. But in truth the paler moths simply died off, leaving the darker ones as survivors. Survival of the fittest, so to speak.
Another theory as to why the darker moths were believed to have survived (as Drabble briefly mentions) was raised by Lamarck. Writing several decades before Darwin, Lamarck believed (wrongly) that organisms adapted to their environments by means of acquired characteristics, changing as the need arose. In other words, the peppered moth willed itself to become darker so as to survive in the sooty North.
Drabble attempts to link the Darwinian and Lamarckian theories to the characters in her novel. Bessie Bawtry, for example, is the young, beautiful and bright (i.e. intelligent) offspring of fairly dull parents. She feels she doesn't belong in the industrialised North and seeks to escape to (what she sees) as the culturally superior South. She survives, but barely. Like the darker peppered moth, Bessie's Yorkshire background makes her stand out at Cambridge. She returns, tail between legs, to the North and takes on a life she detests - marriage to a local boy, housewifery and motherhood. The bitterness she feels towards her own life is vented on her children.
Or in Lamarkian terms, Bessie cannot adapt to the bright, sunny South. She's from darker surroundings and stands out to be attacked to extinction in her Cambridge surrounds. But it is through her 'bobby-dazzler' grand-daughter Faro that dark turns to bright. But paradoxically, Faro moves from the South back to the North. The northern surroundings have become less polluted and brighter and so she won't stand out there.
However, the references to evolutionary and Lamarckian theory are underdone. As I mentioned in the introduction, Drabble's novel is more a traditional family epic with the DNA debate stuck uncomfortably on top. The trouble with 'The Peppered Moth' may be that it is meant to be fiction. But Drabble stumbles over the fence that divides novels from memoir (Bessie Bawtry, as we find in the Afterword to the novel, is based on Drabble's mother). I can't say I wish she'd written a memoir of her mother. But it might have been a better book.
The peppered moth is a potent and graphic symbol of swiftly adaptive natural... Read more
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