Late one night in the summer of 1876, a young woman named Jenny Bonnet was shot dead through the window of her hotel room at San Miguel station, just outside San Francisco. With her when she died were a bag of live frogs, a man’s suit and Blanche Beunon, a prostitute and exotic dancer who had bent out of the line of fire just as the gun went off.
The question of who killed Bonnet – and why – gripped San Francisco for years, especially because the culprit was never found. And now the mystery has reared its head again – in Frog Music, the new novel by the Irish writer Emma Donoghue: author of Room, a runaway bestseller since its publication in 2010 and one of the standout names at this month’s Sydney writers’ festival.
Set over roughly four weeks in that sweltering summer, when temperatures reached record levels and a smallpox epidemic raged through the city, Frog Music examines the mystery of Bonnet’s killing from the point of view of Beunon: a French immigrant involved in an erotic menage a trois with her gambler lover, Arthur, and his companion Ernest.
Beunon’s narrative unfolds along two parallel time sequences – one rooted in the days after Bonnet’s murder, and the other tracing the weeks leading up to it. The result is a clever, complex thriller, full of pitch-perfect period detail – from scraps of lyrics drawn from popular songs of the day to vivid accounts of Bonnet’s frog-catching expeditions in the California backwaters.
As with all Donoghue’s writing, the novel occupies a fascinating position on the boundary between historical fact and imaginative interpretation. Donoghue has a PhD in 18th-century English literature and carries that academic rigour into all her novels, plays and works for radio and film, most of which concern historical figures and their real, meticulously researched experiences.
Over the phone from London, Ontario – Donoghue was born in Dublin in 1969, and moved to Canada aged 28 after studying at Cambridge – she tells me she came up with the idea for Frog Music after reading a study of transgressive 19th-century women, Autumn Stephens’s brilliantly titled Wild Women: Crusaders, Curmudgeons, and Completely Corsetless Ladies in the Otherwise Virtuous Victorian Era.
“There was a page about her case,” she says. “I was hooked by Jenny’s character – she just sort of manages to come at you across the centuries. Eventually I found almost 60 articles on her. Often they would include just one little detail – like about her cracking a joke with the judge even as he was sentencing her. Her sense of humour struck me as extraordinarily proto-modern.”
Bonnet was often in trouble with the law for wearing men’s clothes: it may have been popular in theatres, but cross-dressing in public was illegal at the time. Beunon, by contrast, was voluptuously feminine, with an unconstrained enthusiasm for sex (at least in Donoghue’s fictional incarnation) that lends the novel some eye-popping erotic passages. But the friends were both unconventional women, operating on the fringes of mainstream society.
In that way, they have much in common with many of Donoghue’s characters – from Mary Saunders, the 18th-century prostitute at the centre of another real-life murder in her 2000 novel Slammerkin; to Jack, the narrator of Room, a five-year-old boy measuring out his days in the tiny quarters where he and his mother are being held captive by a menacing, Josef Fritzl-like figure.
Donoghue has long been interested in historical revisionism – in giving voice, through her fiction, to the marginalised, to people whose stories might not otherwise be heard – but she’s anxious about how that makes her sound. “Being a feminist,” she says, “has caused me to get interested in all sorts of power differences in society. But I’m always worried I might sound a bit po-faced when I talk that way.
"In practice, when I write my books, I’m mostly trying to entertain. If you can do both at the same time – if you can mess with people’s minds, and alter their sense of what society was like, at the same time as telling a page-turning story – then all the better.”
Her visit to Sydney for the writers’ festival will be her first trip to Australia. She and her partner, the Canadian academic Chris Roulston, will be leaving their two children – 10-year-old Finn and six-year-old Una – at home for the 12-day trip, and plan to visit the Blue Mountains and Melbourne after taking in as much of the festival as they can.
“I’m trying to choose what to see,” she says, “and literally biting my nails. I’m particularly excited about Andrew Solomon – I worship him. Alice Walker, Thomas Keneally, David Malouf: it’s going to be just glorious, a red-letter adventure. Though there’s always the mingled pleasure and guilt of leaving our children a 14-hour time zone away.”
Room was a hit in Australia, as it was across much of the English-speaking world and beyond. It’s interesting, then, to consider what Donoghue’s Australian readers are making of Frog Music, a novel in which the possibilities of renewal, even redemption, offered by emigration to the new world is a key theme. “Emigration is another of my lingering obsessions,” Donoghue admits. “Having done it twice – to England and to Canada – I’m very interested in all the baggage you bring with you, and the ways in which you can reinvent yourself.”
After Sydney, Donoghue will, of course, get back to the serious business of writing. She’s in the final stages of adapting Room for the big screen with the Irish film director Lenny Abrahamson. There’s another novel in the pipeline and she’s working on her first children’s book, which she is about to put to an important critic: her son.
“I’m so nervous!” she says. “With an adult book, you can picture readers maybe putting down your book and walking away if they’re bored. But with a [children’s] book, you can imagine the kids literally throwing it across the room and saying, ‘That sucks!’
"I’m just about to show a draft to my son and three friends of his. I’m calling them ‘the focus group of consultant editors’.” Donoghue laughs. “I’m really bricking it, you know.”
• Emma Donoghue will be talking about Frog Music at the Sydney Theatre on 22 May as part of the Sydney writers’ festival: see swf.org.au for more details. Frog Music is published by Picador.
