The Peppered Moth - Margaret Drabble

I have just tonight finished reading "the Peppered Moth" by Margaret Drabble.

So then emboldened by this decided to give the discarded “The Peppered Moth” by Margaret Drabble a whirl. BCID: 487-3534075

Well – the Daily Mail described this book as “Wonderfully fluent and engrossing…dazzling” – they lied is all I have to say. I found the tone patronising and positively nasal in some parts of the tale…
“Now let us return to….” Or “We will hear about that later” The Narrator (which on the last page we discover was in fact the author talking through her psychotherapist, or some sort of excuse vaguely familiar… The author should have been renamed Margaret Dribble. She does though explain her difficulties with sorting out who should tell the story and how she had a difficult relationship with her Mother, on whom the book is based.

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Peppered Moth, Margaret Drabble's first novel for five years, tells the stories of four generations of one family, homing in on the female line, and attempts to explain how genes, DNA and environment can change or challenge an individual. The tale begins with Bessie Bawtry, a gifted young woman from a South Yorkshire mining town, who does not live up to her promise, and ends with her granddaughter, Faro Gaulden, "a bobby dazzler" who's radiant with opportunities and ideas, but who still isn't quite making the most of what she has.
It would be a fairly straightforward and enjoyable tale of family life and inherited characteristics, but for Drabble's tone which is, frankly, uneasy. It wavers from the cod nature documentary voice-over of "we must try to rediscover the long-ago infant in her vanished world" to the embarrassingly elegiac "o poor young girls in flower, you poor frail darlings, who will watch over you, who will guide and protect you?"
The afterword goes a long way to explaining this waywardness. Bessie Bawtry, with her hard-won education, her relinquishing lapses into illness, her life of continually deferred pleasures, is based on Drabble's mother, and Bessie's marriage to kindly Joe Barron, and his "lifetime of tragic appeasement", is the fictionalised account of her parent's relationship, in all its bitter tensions. Consequently, there is the sense of filling in biographical gaps with fictional plots and characters, and then carefully spreading thin scientific metaphor over the whole to smooth everything out nicely. Unfortunately it doesn't work; Drabble is too personally involved and her prose suffers for it. It juts and jars at awkward angles, a gawky adolescent of a book rather than a mature, measured reflection on the consequences of family history. --Eithne Farry --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Synopsis

It is 1905, and Bessie is a small child living in a South Yorkshire mining town. Unusually gifted, she sits quietly and studies hard, waiting for the day when she can sit the Cambridge entrance exam and escape the way of life her ancestors have never even thought to question. At the other end of the century her granddaughter, Faro, is listening to a lecture on genetic inheritance. She has returned to the town where her grandmother grew up and sees the families who have lived there for longer than anyone can remember. But for all her exotic ancestry and glamour, has she really travelled any further than them?

Our Dancing Days - Lucy English

Lucy English – Our Dancing Days…Now what on earth was that
all about…..?

I read this on the back of Lucy English’s previous novel Children of Light – which I had found excellent. I found the first few pages very interesting and set the scene well… then we went off on a journey around and through a number of characters, none of which I was particularly sympathetic or even interested in. They were predictable cardboard cut outs…Downward spiral to tragedy…the death scene was thrown away, and I still expected the hero/villain to appear at the end of the book. Boring and trite. BCID: 592-3534079

Book Description
When Don, an aristocratic young Notting Hill bohemian, inherits St John's, a run-down medieval manor house in the depths of the Suffolk countryside, he decides to form a commune with Tessa, an artist, and her friend Deedee. They have an idealist's dream of self-sufficiency, sharing and harmony that seems initially to succeed. It is only when they try to build on this fantasy by introducing others - the mesmerising and charismatic Jack, and single mother Helen and her disturbed small daughter Beauty - that the balance is upset. Tensions emerge and friction builds until a tragic accident finally separates them. Years later, Tessa returns to the house to face again the tragedy that made her flee St John's and come to terms with the fact that her friends betrayed her.
Synopsis
Lucy English's third novel is set in a Suffolk commune in the Seventies where, beneath the blissful summer surface, the young inhabitants are caught in a downward spiral ending in tragedy. When Don, an aristocratic young Notting Hill poet, inherits a stately home in the depths of the Suffolk countryside from an elderly relative, he decides to move there taking with him an artist, Tessa and her best friend, Deedee. A menage a trois develops and as they form a commune and begin to grow their own vegetables, they live together in rural harmony. It is only when they decide to enlarge their group, bringing in strangers encountered at fairs and in pubs -- the mesmerising and charismatic Jack, a single mother Helen and her troublesome six-year-old daughter, Beauty -- that the balance is upset, tensions emerge and the friction builds to its horrific climax.