“Woman’s Mania for Wearing Male Attire Ends in Death.”
A couple of
years ago when I read Room by this
author I was traumatised. It wasn’t a feel good book – claustrophobic but
gripping. Misery lit fiction. So I was apprehensive when a colleague suggested Frog Music as my next read.
I needn’t
have worried. The author’s own pre-release description of Frog Music was historical
fiction based on the true story of a murdered 19th century cross-dressing frog
catcher. Sufficiently far away from misery lit and weird enough to tickle
my fancy, but Frog Music is much more
than that teaser suggests.
1876 San Francisco is the
setting – a society so different to the modern world that it completely
transports the reader. The overwhelming impression is raw cosmopolitan, people
flooding into a thriving city from the rest of the globe. The California gold rush is history but has left
a legacy of wealth, instant gratification, disappointment and beggars. San Francisco swarms with
new Americans, most notably French, Prussians and Chinese. Law and order’s grip
on daily life is as tenuous as the stability of the wooden city buildings that
shudder with each movement of the Earth’s crust and burn to the ground through
accident or riot. Rampant smallpox adds a large dose of carpe diem to the
behaviour of the residents. Donoghue paints all this perfectly.
Blanche Beunon
is our narrator, a young French circus performer who has found a talent for
entertainment of a more adult nature. She lives in comfort thanks to her
earnings but shares a bohemian lifestyle with two male former acrobats that
sinks frequently into depravity. Looking over Blanche’s shoulder, the reader is
in a safer place than Room, but the
plot has a train wreck trajectory from the first chapter.
This tragic
story is delivered in third person, present tense but the timeline alternates
either side of the blood-soaked first few pages in order to explain how things
came to that fateful event and to lead to the eventual resolution of whodunnit.
Once or twice I had to recap in order to be sure whereabouts the story had got
to, but the delivery worked well overall.
There are
very few wise people in Frog Music.
With the exception of old Maria with her destroyed face, all the characters
display different facets of naivety. Blanche is very worldly in her work
environment and doesn’t lack confidence but she is naive in the belief that her
acrobatic ménage of a lifestyle can continue once the complications of adult responsibilities
ensue. The other characters are similarly in denial of their mortality and
cavort with abandon in the face of disease, dishonesty and debauchery.
The catalyst
to this crucible of San Francisco
is Jenny Bonnet the cross-dressing frog catcher. A fascinating character, Jenny
has a massive impact upon everyone in the book but (and no real spoiler here) she
is killed off in the first four pages. She understands the rules of life and
death better than anyone, but is no more able to avoid her own demise. Had she
stayed alive throughout the book and then died towards the end it may have been
unbearable. As it stands, the author breathes life into Jenny’s character and Frog Music is as much a eulogy to Jenny Bonnet
as it is a journey of self-discovery for Blanche Beunon.
Witty,
fast-paced and intricate, Frog Music
leads the reader a merry dance. Sometimes I wanted to laugh, to cry and other
times to take a long hot shower to cleanse the depraved filth of the
Californian heat wave from my pores. Donoghue’s cast act in ways that delight,
titillate and infuriate but their behaviour and attitudes are logical in the
final scheme of things. The many skeletons in the cupboard eventually manifest
themselves, the highest impact being caused by the smallest of them, P’tit. As
different as this is to Room in so
many ways, the hub of Donoghue’s FrogMusic is once again a small child.
