Frog Music: A Novel
by Emma Donoghue
Little, Brown and Company
416 pages, $27.
IT CAN BE SOBERING to think that throughout history millions of life stories have been lost to time. Every small bit of every insignificant life is gone—unless the deceased is fortunate enough to have Emma Donoghue get ahold of it.
In the case of Frog Music, Donoghue’s first historical crime novel, the life in question is that of Jenny Bonnet, a hard-bitten gal who lived in San Francisco in the 1870s, dressed in men’s clothing, and caught frogs for a living. Then, one day, while hanging out in a tavern, she was brutally murdered under circumstances that were mysterious and sensational at the time.
The story is told from the perspective of Jenny’s new friend Blanche Beunon, a high-priced French burlesque dancer who was with Jenny on the night of the murder. Blanche makes up her mind to figure out whodunit, and she suspects her own longtime boyfriend of being the murderer. As luck would have it, San Francisco in the summer of 1876 was in the grip of a record-breaking heat wave and a smallpox epidemic. These conditions only add to the urgency of Blanche’s task. Getting to the bottom of this mystery means literally descending to the depths of the social system—into the world of paup
ers and bohemians that Jenny inhabited—even while continuing to negotiate her own world of sleazy millionaires.
The cast of characters also includes Blanche’s longtime lover Arthur and his hanger-on friend Ernest, both of whom have been living off her largesse for many years. But now they’re peeved because Blanche seems to be flexing some independence, and they blame the free-wheeling, cross-dressing Jenny for this threat to their meal ticket. Oh, they’ve also kidnapped Blanche’s five-year old son, and much of the narrative concerns Blanche’s search for the child. For all of these reasons, she’s convinced that Arthur (and/or Ernest) must have something to do with the murder.
The narrative moves back and forth between Blanche’s initial encounter with Jenny in August—which began with a collision with the bicycle-riding Jenny—and the narrator’s search for her son a month later. With its bounce-around format à la Pulp Fiction, Frog Music is somewhat confusing at first. A rather large (and important) amount of the book is in French, which may vex readers who don’t read in this language, though there is a handy glossary that helps a great deal. We’re quickly taken from country to city with little initial fanfare and left to catch up with the plot’s locale. The story itself begins with a spectacularly bloody murder and proceeds in a time-shifting manner, with our heroine remembering, reflecting, and looking for the man she’s convinced has killed her friend.
But did he? With the back-and-forth timeline—which ultimately becomes integral to the plot’s development—Donoghue keeps her readers guessing. But we’re not merely caught up in a murder mystery: Donoghue draws Blanche’s story out, almost as if she’s opening a sticky door but leaving a curtain intact. Blanche herself is just as much an enigma as the crime she’s trying to solve. We understand that she had a rough upbringing, but we also know that she has experienced a sordid sort of refinement, which only makes her more of a mystery. Readers may momentarily wonder if the narrator is inventing half of her past and all of her surroundings, so surreal is Donoghue’s writing at times.
This dreamy quality is made even more appealing by the knowledge that this novel is not entirely fictional, that the tale is wound around the real murder of Jenny Bonnet, who was killed near San Francisco in 1876—an obscure bit of history that the author details at the end of the novel. This authenticity, something of a Donoghue signature, adds to the intrigue of Frog Music, a case that in real life was never solved.
