The Peppered Moth [Hardcover]

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.

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.

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.