Frog Music

“Well, they don’t make their music just to pass the time,” says Jenny, grinning. “Got to want something to sing about it, no?”

With Frog Music, author Emma Donoghue started with a real life, unsolved historical murder, and after combing through old newspaper articles, censuses, and passenger manifests, she was able to populate an entire novel with actual people and the details of their actual lives. According to this article, Donoghue needed to invent only five fictional characters -- including a nice journalist (because there wasn't one in the historical record) -- since what she had found was so rich in detail. And these actual people had the potential to be fascinating: a female, cross-dressing frog catcher; a Parisienne burlesque dancer; her maques (a dandified gambler and his friend who lived off her avails); and various other people that these main characters would have known. With the central murder, the setting of post-Gold Rush San Francisco, a smallpox epidemic, mob-fuelled racism against Chinese immigrants, the horrifying living conditions of unwanted children, and plenty of sexy-sex, it's hard to credit how this book turned out to be so boring.

Having amassed the non-fiction details listed here, it seems that all Donoghue needed to do was to bring the characters to life and set up a plausible whodunit for the murder -- but the characters were much less interesting than their brief descriptors might suggest and the murderer wasn't a big shocking reveal (although the whydunit remains a bit murky). **spoiler** As soon as John Jr was found with a sore shoulder the night Jenny was murdered with a shotgun, I knew he pulled the trigger and was waiting for the big reveal of why, but murder-for-hire-by-proxy-because-Jenny-hurt-Blanche was lame. **end spoiler** Jenny Bonnet, the frog catcher, was repeatedly arrested in real life for dressing in men's clothing -- and for drunken brawling -- and all of the interesting details that come out in her story are true (from her sister's time in an insane asylum to her own time at the Industrial School). She is by far the most interesting character in the book, but Frog Music is told from the perspective of the French prostitute -- and Blanche only knew Jenny for a short while and not very well. And Blanche is just so wishy-washy: she insists that she's a dancer and a prostitute because that's what she loves to do, but it doesn't take much prodding from Jenny to make her question it; she claims to be fiercely protective of P'tit, but she's always forgetting about him; she plays detective after the murder and takes us down so many wrong paths that it becomes annoying (and especially when she just happens to stumble upon the solution in the end); and mostly, I never for a second believed the love story between Blanche and Arthur. 

According to this article, half of Donoghue’s six pre-Room novels were set before the 20th century. (That many were coming-of-age or love stories featuring gay characters ghettoized Donoghue for a time as a Lesbian Writer.) I'm not looking to ghettoize Donohue, but Frog Music makes the most sense if you think of it as a political work: the only power women wield over men is sexual, and Jenny, by daring to dress as a man, threatened to undermine the whole power structure. The women=good, men=bad, sex=power theme was played out in the other two books I've read by Donohue (Slammerkin was also a historical fiction based on the true life of a good-girl-gone-prostitute that attempts to provide a back story for murder and Room is basically about a man denying a woman's right to wield sexual power), so Donoghue is consistent, anyway. I think I am most disappointed because this book didn't realise its potential: I need to give it two stars because I just didn't like it.

I was also annoyed by the inclusion of so many French songs and little stories about frogs which other readers, apparently, found charming -- to me, it felt like a lazy way to extend the research into a novel. I also hated that this is the lithograph that Arthur loved and insisted on hanging in their apartment:

Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe

If Blanche didn't know how Arthur and Ernest felt about her when she was looking at this every day...bah...it felt pretty heavy-handed to me...

Last complaint: I found it very sad to read, in the source materials, that Blanche died of throat cancer six months after witnessing the murder. That's such a compellingly ironic fact (the prostitute dies within months of trying to go straight) that I don't know why it isn't in Frog Music. Was Donoghue trying for a happy ending, or at least the possibility of one? Once again, I'm just so disappointed by the way that this book doesn't realise the full potential of what it could have been.