Some mothers do 'ave 'em, and Margaret Drabble's Mommie Dearest drew the short straw with a daughter some feel has used her blood for ink. This is a novel which - as she explains in the Afterword - is a fictionalised account of her mother's life, with decidedly Catherine Cookson overtones. This mightn't be what Drabble had in mind but as a gritty saga spanning the generations, it has the hoary earthiness of a good yarn because, ultimately, she can tell a story well. She loses the high moral ground by writing disparagingly about her mother at all, dispelling family angst for universal consumption. But there's a bile underlying the narrative, a passion that gives the writing an edge. The more the dirty linen is strung across the line, the more the neighbours are appalled - but still they look. And so it is with The Peppered Moth, called after a hapless creature who frequents the south Yorkshire mining town backdrop. No butterfly this, though not for want of trying. Brainy Bessie Bawtry left home for Cambridge, the mardi gras for Drabble who regarded it as a gourmet meal-ticket to all that mattered, rather than just another kind of claustrophobia governed by rules and traditions, strangled - especially in the early decades of the last century - by class snobbery.
But Bessie crumbles, grabs her degree, misses her cue, and ends up back in Yorkshire, married, with kids, and the sorry lot of the so-called ordinary bod. This makes her bitter, manipulative and a harrowing effort for daughter Chrissie, who herself begets a daughter, Faro, and whose latter-day DNA investigations somehow attempt to pull the book together. Chrissie's no more likeable than her mother, a real martyr to the cause but she's honest, and her character seems almost more rounded than that of the sepia-tinted Bessie. Drabble's renowned wit is replaced by a glacial sense of superiority. The knife is twisted with deftness. One shudders but admires the skill. The novel does, on occasion, drift off in tangents. It is Drabble's first in five years but it is not as focused as the trilogy, The Radiant Way, A Natural Curi- osity, The Gates of Ivory, or say, The Witch of Exmoor.
Drabble occasionally loses her nerve. She can't even begin to imagine why Bessie might have married her husband Joe. The Afterword makes searing reading, with the novelist thrashing a mother now too dead to defend herself. Feminism was, after all, about choice - about the freedom to make good Christmas puddings, or not. Drabble might be petty on the issue but she knows how to stir the mixture. Heady stuff.
Mary Moloney is an Irish Times journalist