Rating: 
Summary: an important lesson embedded in a trying novel
Review: "The Peppered Moth" is the eighty-year saga of an English family, told through the relationships among the women of the family. It chronicles the youth, education, marriages, dreams, triumphs, and failures of Bessie Bawtry, her daughter Chrissie, and Chrissie's daughter Faro. Along the way, it addresses concerns of heredity and predestination, most notably the question of whether our destiny and ultimate happiness are determined by the lives of our parents.This book suffers from many failings. Most glaringly, the everpresent authorial voice alternates between preaching to the characters and bemoaning their (not altogether dreadful) fate. The discussions of heredity and destiny are just that: discussions, in which the author tells us what we should glean from the story rather than letting the narrative speak for itself. When she isn't lecturing, Drabble isn't a bad writer: she manages to construct a coherent story that spans nearly a century and encompasses over 300 pages without seeming excessive. But she isn't a great writer either. Her prose is serviceable but not notable, and the book is rarely engrossing for more than five or ten pages at a time. It seems to be designed for slow, measured reading and consideration - an approach, like the author's heavy-handedness, not altogether compatible with the novel form. "The Peppered Moth" is an interesting book. It raises issues that are worth considering, and it raises them through a panoramic view of mother-daughter relations that might be breathtaking if Drabble gave us room to breathe. It could be a thought-provoking read for a woman trying to come to grips with her own maternal lineage. But it isn't a fun book, and as a novel (which must entertain its readers, or else offer something dazzling in the way of insight) it ultimately fails.
Rating: 
Summary: A relaxed and unhygienic regime
Review: Although I enjoyed Margaret Drabble's "sixties bachelor-girl novels," as I called them--novels about female Cambridge graduates rebelling against the status quo for women--I prefer her later novels, which chronicle English society and culture through the eyes of women (and occasionally men) of Drabble's generation. The Peppered Moth is a departure from her usual novels, since it includes, for the first time in her fiction, historical material about the early twentieth century. One of the three main characters, Bessie Bawtry (a depressed woman based on Drabble's mother), was born in the early 1900s: we learn about her brilliance and depression, her scholarship to Cambridge, and her return home to the industrial town she swore she would leave forever. But Drabble continues to chronicle changing times: Bessie's granddaughter, Faro, a science writer, attends lectures on mitochondrial DNA and genealogy, and apparently has transcended her family's tendency toward depression. But my favorite character is Faro's mother, Chrissie, who comes of age in the sixties and prefers the "relaxed and unhygienic regime" of her Aunt Dora's home to her mother's fussy neatness. It bears rereading, which I have not yet done.
Rating: 
Summary: Compelling and intelligent.
Review: At the back of the book Margaret Drabble gives her apologia for writing THE PEPPERED MOTH. She explains that while writing it she thought mostly of her mother and in what ways the character of Bessie is and is not like her. This is interesting in the same way that gossip is interesting: it's unnecessary but somehow vital. Apart from the apologia, the novel stands on its own. The story concentrates on a Yorkshire community which is presently being traced back to its origins. All kinds of contemporary images are placed against antique ones: DNA samples, a lecture on heredity, environmentalists, journalists, and computer specialists lie in answer to the ash of a turn-of-the-century mining town, Cambridge, poverty, new and inherited wealth and prickly class differences. An environmentalist discovers an ancient corpse believed to be the oldest thread of this community. Through several generations the lives, loves and relations of four women are traced. The story may wander and the reader may be in danger of getting lost in the details but it never flags. Perhaps too many sociological issues are brought into play but the attempt to link the past to the present, and the present to the past, keeps this novel moving.
Rating:
Summary: The peppered moth and evolution
Review: I found this book very interesting, the way Drabble uses the peppered moth to symbolise the character of Bessie, her mother who, in spite of discrimination against women in the 19th Century survives, and gets a university education but her character darkens. Likewise,the peppered moth, survives the affects of coal-mining on the environment in the north of England but evolves darker in colour, unlike the lighter colour species in other parts of England. The story is about mitochondrial DNA or matrlineal descent from the female line of four generations of women in a family.
Drabble has a tendency to comment on characters and what the reader should be getting from the story rather than letting the narrative or dialogue tell the story. She mentions in her notes that the latter part of the novel is not based on real people but is fiction. Perhaps her sharp criticism of her mother causes some guilt and she ends the story with a sympathetic portrayal of Bessie in a loving act towards her grandaughter Faro, when she hides the sixpenny bit in the Christmas pudding for the child. Dora, Bessie's spinster sister is portrayed as having no ambition and is stolidily loyal to her working-class background in Yorkshire while the ambitious Bessie cannot get far enough away from her roots. Dora is a happier character.
Rating:
Summary: The peppered moth and evolution
Review: I found this book very interesting, the way Drabble uses the peppered moth to symbolise the character of Bessie, her mother who, in spite of discrimination against women in the 19th Century survives, and gets a university education but her character darkens. Likewise,the peppered moth, survives the affects of coal-mining on the environment in the north of England but evolves darker in colour, unlike the lighter colour species in other parts of England. The story is about mitochondrial DNA or matrlineal descent from the female line of four generations of women in a family.
Drabble has a tendency to comment on characters and what the reader should be getting from the story rather than letting the narrative or dialogue tell the story. She mentions in her notes that the latter part of the novel is not based on real people but is fiction. Perhaps her sharp criticism of her mother causes some guilt and she ends the story with a sympathetic portrayal of Bessie in a loving act towards her grandaughter Faro, when she hides the sixpenny bit in the Christmas pudding for the child. Dora, Bessie's spinster sister is portrayed as having no ambition and is stolidily loyal to her working-class background in Yorkshire while the ambitious Bessie cannot get far enough away from her roots. Dora is a happier character.
Rating: 
Summary: boring
Review: I really didn't enjoy much of anything about this book. The author didn't keep my interest. It was just dull and boring.I gathered from what I read she wasn't a happy person, and then I read that this book was about her mother. No doubt she had a difficult childhood but that wasn't what I cared to read. i could never recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Rambling, dense and intellectual
Review: Margaret Drabble is most definetly a very intelligent woman but I totally agree that her personal stake in this material was too deep and the reader is often left adrift. The historical details of early 20th century england is fascinating as well as the main charachter's descent into the negative oppressive options of menopause. I was bored and lost with the material, the DNA business, the archeaological digression and the author's idolization of Faro (sorry I didn't feel that way about this charachter - why should the writer impose this patronization?) Its a good lesson to would be writers: mind your audience or beware.
Rating:
Summary: Author in context
Review: Margaret Drabble's multigenerational tale points out the astonishing changes that the twentieth century wrought on the physical and mental landscape of England. Industries rise and fall, slag heaps are replaced by parkland and wreak firy revenge, families that were rooted in one place for thousands of years effervesce into intellectual and social freedom. Some people can't make it. Bessie, based on Drabble's (and A.S. Byatt's) own mother, weighs down the narrative and her family with a loss of nerve that turns a talented young woman into a self-centered black hole sucking energy from all around her. The book is uneven -- Bessie's shadow is large and dark -- but I found the writing tighter than in some recent Drabble novels. As a near contemporary of Drabble's, raised in the industrial North and educated in the effete South of England, I was convinced by the characters and the settings. More importantly, a week after finishing the book, I am still finding myself reflecting on families and our heredity of DNA, culture and environment.
Rating:
Summary: Very Boring
Review: THE PEPPERED MOTH is layered with subplots and ideas. Expect to stay with this novel for a while--even after reading the last line. Drabble creates multi-dimensional characters and uses select words--I've come to think of "fug" as Drabble's own and won't mess with it. Janice Daugharty, author of LIKE A SISTER
Rating: 
Summary: Mixed Success
Review: We have seen a version of the difficult mother character Drabble executes here in "Jerusalem the Golden." In the end, I think it's better to either do a straight memoir, implying, This is my opinion, take it or leave it, or to write a mother in as an influence on the main character, as was successfully done in "Jerusalem." During the first half of this book, when the author focuses on trying to tell the story of the mother, Bessie, this brilliant author's fictional voice fails her. There is none of the stream of consciousness intimacy, the being in the moment textured detail that make Drabble's works so rich and pleasurable. She simply could not seem to get in into Bessie's head, and her story is told sternly from the outside. The book picks up noticably mid-way, around the 160s, when the point of view is almost fully shifted to Bessie's daughter, Chrissie, who rebelled against her dour mother and got entangled in the excesses of the 1960s, and her daughter, Bessie's grandaughter, Faro, who represents, rather baldly, continuation of the female line. I found myself wanting to know in even more depth about Chrissie's melodramatic life. Through her eyes, we get a better sense of Bessie's than in the narrative the preceded it. Chrissie being of Drabble's generation, she comes alive most. While Faro is perfectly pleasant, again, I felt the author didn't try hard enough to imagine her. It's almost as if people like Chrissie, who inflicted the chaos of the hippie generation (although here it was less Chrissie's fault than her philandering husband's)on their children, need to tell themselves that their kids are O.K., when they're clearly not. From the time frame, Faro is pushing 40, yet seems to still be inexplicably caught in unhealthy relating patterns with men. Where are the influences, the anger, the confused but I'm sure intense feelings about the much loved but deadbeat father? When Drabble was a young writer, she used to present the inner lives of such young characters with such breathtaking reality. Being of Faro's generation, I just felt the author didn't do her justice. For example, anyone who hadn't learned to discard leeches like the Sebastien character by the end of her student years must have serious developmental problems. In other ways, Faro seemed too smart for this kind of masochistic passivity. She hooks up with a better man toward the end, by why suddenly now? It's all a bit too neat, and doesn't come out of any discernable character change. That said, once we're in mid-stream, the book really does revert in many ways to the high quality of much of Drabble's previous fiction -- the attention to detail, the moment by moment reckonings between the present and the past. I especially enjoyed Nick Gaulden's funeral, with all the ex-wives, girlfriends and offspring. But again, Faro couldn't have been as unaffected as the author depicts her by this complicated family situation. If you can get through the first half of the book, the second half is worthwhile.
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