Reading on, we learn the following: Blanche arrived to Chinatown in San Francisco, via Paris, with a travelling part-time circus-performing-huckster called Arthur Deneve and his friend Ernest Girard. At the beginning of the story we are informed that Blanche’s crossdressing friend, Jenny Bonnet, has been shot dead.īlanche, a voluptuous exotic dancer who works at a whorehouse called the House of Mirrors, suspects that the killers may have gunned down the wrong lady. The book is set in San Francisco in 1876. And 24-year-old Blanche Danseuse is the central character. Donoghue’s eighth novel is called Frog Music. Sorry, I should really explain a few things. But in this book I push the reader’s sympathy to the maximum and say: Blanche is really no good as a mother.” “In my novel Room I was looking at the mother as a Madonna figure.

“I would see it more as the crossdresser and the whore, which are two different variations on womanhood. “I’m not really looking at Madonna versus whore in this book,” the 44-year-old-writer replies. Sitting on a comfortable couch alongside Emma Donoghue - in a dark room in Soho that resembles a parlour for a member of the London aristocracy from the 17th century - I mention that this psychological conundrum instantly came to my mind, halfway through reading her latest novel. In Freud’s view, many men in long-term relationships see women as either the embodiment of virginal-puritanical-innocence, or as debased prostitutes that they continually lust after, but to whom they cannot offer their affection. Before you read on, remember that much of Freud’s analyses are merely symbolic gestures, grounded in mythology, and should not be taken literally.

Frog music by emma donoghue