Book Review: Frog Music

Book: Frog Music
Author: Emma Donoghue
Publisher: Picador
Pages: 416
Price: Rs 599

Emma Donoghue likes to weave her stories around real-life events. Her last book, the 2010 Booker Prize-shortlisted Room was about a mother and son held captive inside a locked room, an idea that grew out of the grotesque Fritzl case in which a father kept his daughter captive and sired children by her.
Frog Music is drawn from the real-life murder of Jenny Bonnet in 1876. The novel is set in San Francisco, a city of epidemics and diseases, rising crime, racial violence and prostitution, with glaring extremes of wealth and poverty. The novel starts with the murder, and then takes the narration forward through flashes of events that led up to it and those that follow.

The novel's protagonist is Blanche Beaunon, who used to be an exotic dancer at Paris's famous Cirque d'Hiver theatre, and now lives with her partner, Arthur, and his friend Earnest in San Francisco. She continues to be a burlesque dancer, but moonlights as a prostitute, having sexual relations with both Arthur, who is her pimp, and Earnest. Both men live off her earnings — drinking, gambling and squabbling in the process.

In this chaotic city flooded with immigrants, Blanche chances upon Jenny, an outspoken young woman who makes her living by catching frogs and supplying their legs to restaurants. Jenny loves to dress as a man, even though there is a law against it, and always carries a revolver deep in her trouser pockets. The two become friends and Jenny brings about a change in Blanche by questioning her lifestyle.

Soon, Blanche sets out to find the son she had given birth to a few years ago. Arthur had given away the child to safe care, he told her, so that her work did not suffer. Blanche finds her son, P'tait, living in a miserable condition in a ranch in the countryside. Things spiral downward from then on in her relations with the two men. Blanche resolves to abandon them and quit prostitution in order to start life afresh with Jenny and her son. This angers the men and Blanche is forced to leave town with Jenny and her son. They live happily for a brief while until Jenny is shot dead. With Jenny dead, her money gone and Arthur taking her son away, Blanche tries to find out more about Jenny.

One of the striking things about Frog Music is the way Donoghue chips away at the rigid gender roles of the time. Jenny, who dresses like a man, is an exception, but she does not care about societal disapproval and even challenges the law. There is also a homoerotic undercurrent in the relation of these two lively yet gritty women. Donoghue also explores a very different side of motherhood than she did in Room: Blanche appears a weary mother, at times not knowing what to do with her child.

Then, there is the music. In keeping with the musical theme and setting of the novel, around 30 songs pop up from time to time, and Donoghue has an appendix with the lyrics to these. While the mystery of Jenny's murder and Blanche's attempts to get to the truth get cumbersome at points, what stays with you are the conflicted sexualities of the women, San Francisco as the melting pot of all kinds of people and Blanche's slow journey towards inner freedom.