Frog Music
Emma Donoghue
[Picador]
Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music is a bilingual, historical whodunnit that is impressively researched and convincingly written. Set in tinderbox San Francisco over a summer of drought, smallpox, and race riots, French former-acrobat Blanche Beunon lives in a ménage with her mac (or pimp) Arthur and his protégé Ernest. She performs burlesque and occasionally prostitutes, and has outsourced rearing of baby P’tit to the more germane surroundings of a doctress’s “farm”. Into this strange setup walks Jenny Bonnet. Jenny is an unreadable, trouser-wearing frog catcher, who befriends Blanche after running her over on a bicycle. They draw close, and Jenny asks Blanche questions – like where is her baby really? – prompting personal revaluations that significantly deepen the plot.
It’s no spoiler that Jenny dies – she’s done in by page three. The book’s structure is intriguing, spread evenly between the events leading up to Jenny’s murder, and its aftermath. But the constant time-travelling feels arbitrary and disjointed. Any impulse to re-read the opening scene is pre-empted by Donoghue when she repeats it almost verbatim towards the book’s close. English is an acquired language for Blanche, and Donoghue is successful at inhabiting the mind of a non-native speaker who slips back into French whenever she’s vexed. The narration is so laced with Gallicisms that Donoghue thinks to include a French Glossary. But more often than not, these are familiar phrases like “Bon Voyage” or “Voilà”, or Blanche translates them herself, rendering this effort fairly useless. Donoghue is an accomplished writer, but with her repetitions and explanations, there is a mite too much hand-holding. Frog Music takes its cues from a real murder, just as Donoghue’s novel Room responded to the Fritzl case and spate of other kidnappings. Maternal resilience and infant neglect are treated here too through reflections on the Victorian practice of baby farming. The parallels with recent revelations from Tuam and other mother-and-baby homes across Ireland add a renewed context of significance to this powerful yet uneven book.
Words: Eoin Tierney
