Frog Music by Emma Donoghue

Blanche is French, in her early twenties, living in San Francisco  and working as a dancer, singer, and call girl. She lives with Arthur, a dandy who uses the money she earns from her sex work and performing to do nothing except gamble with an odd young man, Ernest, who completes the ménage a trois and sometimes makes a three-some when Arthur and Blanche engage in sexual activity.  Blanche has had a baby, which Arthur has handed over to what proves to be a horrific baby ‘farm’ where his growth has been stunted—but Blanche believes he is alright, out in the open air on a proper farm. Or does she?  Blanche has ambivalent thoughts about almost everything , including her sexual activities.

The date is the summer of 1876, and there is a smallpox epidemic raging. The action of the plot is initiated by a chance meeting between Blanche and Jenny—who wears men’s clothes, rides a penny-farthing bike, and makes her living by collecting frogs for the French restaurants. Jenny comes back with Blanche to her rooming house, which she actually owns, having saved her sex-worker money to buy it, and meets Arthur and Ernest.  Jenny makes disparaging remarks to Arthur and Ernest, and she leads Blanche to question why she supports the two of them.  The ménage breaks up for a number of reasons, for which Jenny is the catalyst: Blanche and Jenny go out to the edges of San Francisco and stay a few days at a small flea-bag hotel: and, on the third night there, Jenny is shot and killed by someone who fires through the window. Blanche is sure that Arthur or Ernest did it, meaning to kill her and not Jenny, but providentially Blanche bent down at the moment the shots were fired.  And from there on, the plot is essentially Blanche trying to find Arthur and Ernest, pin the murder on them, and in the process retrieving her baby from the baby farm and then losing it again.

The novel proceeds very cleverly by juxtaposing the present and the past. The murder of Jenny comes early on, and then—alternately--we go to the past and the present; the past being the meeting with Jenny, the break with Arthur and Ernest, and the events leading up to the murder; and the present, covering what happens after the murder, when Blanche loses her baby, recovers it, and faces a distressingly uphill struggle to solve the murder and get back on her feet again. The reader needs to keep alert to the dates.

This does not do justice to what an extraordinary book this is. As I read it, I kept thinking—heavens, what an enormous amount of research she much have done to recreate San Francisco in 1876. I found the detail just staggering. The streets, Chinatown, the bars, the music halls-- the whole milieu was extremely well described and obviously drawn from contemporary accounts. I thought that Emma Donoghue must have read a year’s worth of newspapers to get it all right.

And when you get to the end—she describes all the research, and--BIG SURPRISE, at least for me--you learn that the whole plot revolves around real historical characters and a notorious murder of a cross-dressing female who caught frogs for a living and rode a penny-farthing. There is also a glossary of all the French expressions used in the text, which are plentiful, and short articles about the various songs that crop up from time to time.

If you are somewhat averse to sexual content, be warned there is some fairly explicit sex—but it is certainly very minor in a book this length. And perhaps my only criticism is to wonder a bit about Blanche’s sexuality because she does seem to enjoy her prostitute role and also seems to get turned on rather too easily.

On this aspect, the following is from the Washington Post review by Ron Charles:

“…these feminist issues have always been prominent in Donoghue’s fiction (and in her nonfiction — she’s an illuminating literary critic with a PhD in English from Cambridge University). Fans will recall that the superhuman mom in “Room” was willing to do anything to save her child, but Blanche is a more nuanced character. This isn’t a whore with a heart of gold so much as a woman with a heart of many alloys. She often hates being a mother and feels buffeted by crosscurrents of resentment toward her baby and love for him. “She can’t go out,” Donoghue writes, “can’t have a bath, can’t do anything but sit here staring at the saddest, ugliest baby in the world.” How many parents have fumed with that secret frustration? “Much too late to wish this small life undone. And yet she does wish it, every time her eyes approach him.”

Donoghue  portrays Blanche’s sexuality as similarly conflicted. She knows “the rhythmic friction between desire and disgust,” and she’s willing to admit to herself that she sometimes feels aroused by being “used, abased, crushed into something else.” But can she still detect the difference between pleasure and exploitation, between what she wants and what others want from her? Here are many shades of grey from a writer who knows how to use all of them.”

Strongly recommended.