Frog Music
by Emma Donoghue
Little, Brown, 416 ppp., $27
Emma Donoghue’s last novel, her best-selling Room (2010), brought readers fiercely, spellbindingly into the world of a captive small boy and his mother.
With her latest, Frog Music, the brilliant author employs similar literary alchemy to depict the lives of two Frenchwomen, immigrants to San Francisco in the 1870s.
It begins with a real-life, never-solved 1876 murder of 22-year-old (or thereabouts) Jenny (nee Jeanne) Bonnet, pronounced “bone-AY,” a la Francaise. She’s shot at a railway-station boardinghouse near San Francisco, with her friend, 25-year-old Blanche Beunon, sitting nearby.
As the shots fly, Blanche is bending over, trying to loosen boot ties. Blanche suspects immediately that she was the intended victim but escapes with not a mark on her “except a tiny graze on her cheek from flying glass. It should have been me, not poor Jenny.”
The women had fled the city fearful that Blanche’s ex-paramour, Arthur, and his always-present friend and partner-in-mayhem, Ernest, have murder on their minds. Frog Music flits between 1876, as Blanche tries desperately to solve her friend’s killing, and their recent past, showing us how Jenny and Blanche’s relationship developed.
The pair meet under less-than-ideal circumstances when bicycle-riding Jenny knocks Blanche over on the street. Blanche, a former circus star now a famous burlesque dancer, is furious but also intrigued by Jenny, whom she first assumes is a boy.
“This is a girl,” Blanche ponders, amazed, “for all the gray jacket, vest, pants, the jet hair hacked above the sunburned jawline.” Jenny, it turns out, has gone to jail repeatedly for dressing as a man. Jenny also has a most unusual job: She wades into the swamps each night to capture frogs for the city’s restaurants’ frog-leg cuisine.
Blanche lives with Arthur and Ernest in a Chinatown house that Blanche, however questionable her employment, has painstakingly saved enough money to buy. The city seethes under a double crisis: a yellow fever plague and a heat wave that literally brings people to their knees. Dead horses fester on the streets, brought down by heat exhaustion.
Blanche also bears a secret: a baby with Arthur who’s been farmed out to a caretaker because of Blanche’s strange hours and, frankly, her total disinterest in motherhood.
Just before the murder, she hums a French lullaby that Jenny loosely translates: “Shut your trap, little baby, before I shut it for you.” Jenny notes, astutely: “Guess most lullabies boil down to that.”
As with Room, the book thrives on Donoghue’s precisely poignant details, such as when the boarding house keeper stops the clock at 8:49 p.m. when Jenny is murdered, and the thoughtful passages revealing Blanche and Jenny’s pasts, their blossoming friendship and how it inspires Blanche to take more control of her life.
“Jenny’s an odd kind of woman: part boy, part clown, part animal,” Donoghue writes. “An original, accountable to no one, bound by no ties, who cocks her head as she pleases. Their closeness has sprung up as rapidly and cheekily as a weed. Blanche was meant to cross Jenny’s path on Kearny Street on Saturday night, she realizes with a surge of conviction — even if the encounter left her with a few bruises. This is the friend Blanche has been waiting a quarter of a century for without even knowing it.”
Frog Music is full of free love, the devastating horrors of 19th-century San Francisco, the effects of plague and, most precious of all, dozens of tidbits of songs from the era.
They fit perfectly within the context of the story; I wish the publisher would put out a CD of them, or at least a booklet with the musical notation instead of just the words.
This is a book to cherish, to share with your friends and book clubs, to buy for every reader on your Christmas list, and to read again in a few years. Adored is not too strong a word to describe my feelings for it. My one wish: Emma Donoghue, could you please write faster?
