The Peppered Moth - Softcover

Drabble, Margaret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140297162 ISBN 13: 9780140297164

Publisher: Penguin, 2001

Synopsis

It is 1905, and Bessie is a small child living in a South Yorkshire mining town. Unusually gifted, she sits quietly and studies hard, waiting for the day when she can sit the Cambridge entrance exam and escape the way of life her ancestors have never even thought to question. At the other end of the century her granddaughter, Faro, is listening to a lecture on genetic inheritance. She has returned to the town where her grandmother grew up and sees the families who have lived there for longer than anyone can remember. But for all her exotic ancestry and glamour, has she really travelled any further than them?

About this title

Review:

The Peppered Moth, Margaret Drabble's first novel for five years, tells the stories of four generations of one family, homing in on the female line, and attempts 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 does not live up to her promise, and ends with her granddaughter, Faro Gaulden, "a bobby dazzler" who's radiant with opportunities and ideas, but who still isn't quite making the most of what she has.

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

Review:

PRAISE FOR "THE PEPPERED MOTH"

"The sisters Drabble and Byatt are the modern equivalent of the Brontes. Both are at the top of English literature and letters."--"The New York Times"
"This book fairly bounces. Its zest derives in large part from the perfectly sustained tone, which expresses humor without poking fun, and deep regret without sentimentality."--"The Atlantic Monthly"
PRAISE FOR "THE PEPPERED MOTH"
"The sisters Drabble and Byatt are the modern equivalent of the Brontes. Both are at the top of English literature and letters."--"The New York Times"
"This book fairly bounces. Its zest derives in large part from the perfectly sustained tone, which expresses humor without poking fun, and deep regret without sentimentality."--"The Atlantic Monthly"
"

PRAISE FOR THE PEPPERED MOTH
"The sisters Drabble and Byatt are the modern equivalent of the Brontes. Both are at the top of English literature and letters."--The New York Times
"This book fairly bounces. Its zest derives in large part from the perfectly sustained tone, which expresses humor without poking fun, and deep regret without sentimentality."--The Atlantic Monthly
"

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0140297162
• ISBN 13: 9780140297164
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400