[.ca] The Peppered Moth (ISBN 0771028814)

From Amazon.com:
In The Peppered Moth, Margaret Drabble chronicles four generations in the life of a family, homing in on the female line and attempting 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 fails to live up to her promise. It ends with her granddaughter, Faro Gaulden, "a bobby dazzler" radiant with opportunities and ideas, who nonetheless can't quite make the most of what she has. All of this would produce 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 clinical voice-over ("We must try to rediscover the long-ago infant in her vanished world") to the mawkish elegy ("O poor young girls in flower, you poor frail darlings, who will watch over you, who will guide and protect you?"). What happened? Drabble's afterword, in fact, explains a great deal of this waywardness. Bessie Bawtry, with her hard-won education, her relinquishing lapses into illness, and her life of deferred pleasures, is based on the author's mother. Consequently, there is the sense of filling in biographical gaps with fictional plots and characters, and then carefully plastering everything into place with a thin layer of scientific metaphor. Drabble, alas, is too personally involved with this material, and her prose suffers. It juts and jars at awkward angles, reducing The Peppered Moth to a gawky adolescent of a book instead of a mature, measured reflection on family history. --Eithne Farry

Very Boring:
The book was simply "blah." Reading it was like trying to walk through shoulder-high mud--slow going. Trying to maintain an interest in Bessie was difficult. I eventually gave up. I have not read anything else by this author but hope other works are better.

Ancestral legacies:
I found this novel to be a fascinating account of the whole nature/nurture debate, focusing primarily on mothers and daughters. Drabble's love of words shines through in her beautiful prose style. Her occasional authorial intrusions didn't bother me; rather they were witty and insightful. The descriptions of Northern England were beautifully done as well. We could almost see and smell the dirt and grime of the mining towns. Her story is woven through with discussion of genetics and dna, and of just how much our genetic inheritance plays a factor in our futures. The main characters of Bessie, her daughter Chrissie, and her granddaughter Faro are all interesting and dense portrayals. Each one reflects the time period in which she lives, as well as her genetic, environmental, and emotional backgrounds. Finally, the novel resonates with the question of how far do we actually get from our past--not insomuch as geographical mileage, but in emotional distance. Is there an escape from an unhappy past? Drabble attempts to answer this with each of her female characters. The answer is seemingly yes AND no, as Drabble reveals in her afterward with revelations about her own mother (on which the main character of Bessie is based).