(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) While talking about her work to The New Yorker, 45-year-old Irish author Emma Donoghue confessed that she had a penchant for "drawing on fact to spin her fiction". That is evident in her 2010 international bestseller, Room, which went on to become a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and shot Donoghue into literary stardom. After all, Room, a chillingly suspense-packed tale told from the viewpoint of five-year-old Jack, was inspired by the shocking events of the 2008 Fritzl case that saw a father imprison his daughter over the course of 24 years. While many of her fans expected Donoghue's latest work, Frog Music, to be much like her previous bestseller - easy to read, with childish language and short sentences (it was written from the viewpoint of a five-year-old, remember?) - the novel is, instead, a classic whodunit that takes the author right back to her historic fiction roots.
The novel begins in a small rented room in the outskirts of San Francisco, where French burlesque dancer Blanche Beunon and her friend, the quirky Jenny Bonnet, are temporarily staying. Blanche bends down to undo her garter, and in the course of a few seconds, bullets shatter the window, killing Jenny, and leaving Blanche shaken but unharmed. Thus begins Blanche's terrified yet determined goal to find and bring the killer to justice, while dealing with her own personal life that is fast spinning out of control.
Donoghue has based the novel on the real unsolved murder of Jenny Bonnet in the summer of 1876. Having read about the strange murder years ago, she found herself intrigued by the victim - notorious for dressing in men's attire (a crime during that time), picking fights and being employed as a frog-catcher by several restaurants - and meticulously researched every aspect of her untimely death through oft-misspelled newspaper reports, birth, marriage and immigration records, municipal reports and photographs.
The effort shows; Frog Music reconstructs the events leading up to her death in meticulous detail through the eyes of the protagonist Blanche, whose character is as vibrant and unique as they come. A former star at the Parisian circus, Blanche is now a 'soiled dove', working as an exotic dancer to support herself, her leeching lover Arthur Deneve and his companion Ernest Gerard. She's also torn between trying to be a mother to her infant P'tit (Blanche's complete lack of maternal instinct is a breath of fresh air in a literary world packed with doting mums) and trying to resume her usual scandalous lifestyle. However, with the death of Jenny, everything spins out of control; decade-old relationships come to a screeching halt, there's betrayal on every side, and Blanche finds herself on the streets of Chinatown with no money or friends, while desperately trying to unravel the death of a friend she barely knew.
Donoghue brings the summer of 1876 in Chinatown, San Francisco to life; the sweltering heat wave that engulfed the city, the widespread poverty and the smallpox epidemic are meticulously described: "The air's a stinking miasma of all the steams and soots San Franciscans can produce. One newspaper's dug up an odd little fellow who's been noting down what his thermometer tells him every day since he arrived in '49. This summer of 1876 is the hottest season in his records, with the mercury hitting ninety every afternoon."
However, while Room was deliberately simple, Frog Music is chock-full with minute details that makes it a tad tedious. Add to this the nonlinear narratives (the plot constantly jumps from before Jenny's death to after), the lavish sprinkling of French phrases, and the popular mid-Victorian ballads scattered throughout the novel (because, as Donoghue describes it, "everybody sang back then, whether in public or private, without a blush"), and you have a seriously complex novel. While the overall effect is a methodical read, it does take away from the fast-paced suspense of the plot.
Those expecting another novel in the style of Room will have to wait. Frog Music is packed with drama, suspense and mystery - all the elements of top-notch fiction - but the attention to every minute detail and in-depth descriptions set it completely apart from Donoghue's former masterpiece. Then again, being different is not necessarily a bad thing.
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