IT’S not easy to know where to begin with Frog Music, the first novel that Emma Donoghue has published since her truly spectacular Room. Set in the less-than-glamorous late 1800s, Frog Music plays out in San Francisco, a town staggering about after the gold rush in the American West, weighed down by an influx of Chinese immigrants, smallpox, and old-school morality.

It opens with a murder: the killing of one Jenny Bonnet, notorious for dressing in male clothing and supplier of frog legs to assorted eateries across the City by the Bay. This is not a new trope, but it’s interesting because Jenny’s friend, Blanche Beunon (who functions as Donoghue’s protagonist) is convinced that the killer was actually aiming for her.

It’s not hard to imagine assassination attempts being rife in the San Francisco that Donoghue painstakingly sketches out: the city is both metaphorically and literally on fire, with the temperature at record highs, racial violence, teeming immigrants running riot, and a smallpox epidemic that’s barely under control. Blanche is, by the standards of this time, practically one of the One Percent — she’s a French émigré and a good-time-girl (cabaret, stripping, prostitution) who uses her earnings to not only rapidly amass material wealth for herself (an apartment building, an ice-box, tenants), but to also support her incredibly slimy lover Arthur and his louche friend, Ernest, in an odd sort of an arrangement.

Jenny enters the picture on a bicycle, knocking Blanche over in the street en route. By way of apology, the two wind up having a drink together, and once Jenny has defended Blanche against a drunken lecher, their friendship combusts. Like a roaring fire, while it warms Blanche, it also singes her: Jenny’s bravado not only extends to cross-dressing (a deviance of criminal nature in that day and age), it also includes a veritable barrage of impertinent questions. One after another, conversations with Jenny lead Blanche to take a good hard look at her life, and she doesn’t seem to like what she sees.

The catalyst that changes everything is Jenny’s query about Blanche’s son, P’tit Arthur, whom she and Arthur had given up to be raised in the countryside, rather than in the city. Spurred by Jenny’s gentle barbs, Blanche seeks out to retrieve P’tit, eventually discovering him in a fetid dump, covered in filth. This is when things take a turn for the (irrevocable) worse: wracked by guilt that is compounded by resentment, Blanche whisks her impossible — and it is implied, damaged — son away from his so-called caregivers, and decides to take him to her own breast.

This is not as easy as it would seem, because the presence of the child further destabilises the relationship between Arthur, Ernest and Blanche, leading eventually to Blanche fleeing her own home, leaving the child behind. It is, as she admits to herself in the novel, “a third-rate melodrama”: not only must Blanche re-evaluate her own life and relationship with Arthur, she must also cope with the death of her friend, the fear that she’s next, and the looming spectre of her son’s death, whether through ill-health or at the hands of her erstwhile paramour.

You’d think that all of this would make for a slightly more exciting novel; Donoghue has, as a matter of fact, based her tale on the true story of Jenny Bonnet, who was a real person back in San Francisco. But the story is, despite her detailed historical research, shallow — it’s a skein, not a carpet. We know, after all, that Blanche is going to live; the question is not whether she will die, but whether she will find Jenny’s killer. This is not a question deep enough to sustain the momentum of a novel over a few hundred pages.

It doesn’t help that Donoghue seems to have taken all of her descriptive powers, used so well in Room, and applied them almost exclusively to setting the scene of San Francisco. Her characters, including these two potentially fantastic women, are shadowy at best: they grin and guffaw and scoff and giggle and snarl a lot, but they fail to actually materialise in any meaningful way. And although Donoghue is really excellent at her stage design, even San Francisco soon becomes a bit boring, because it is fundamentally a backdrop to the primary plot of the novel. That plot struggles to overcome the inertia of its own premise, and can’t move beyond hitting the same two beats again and again: “where’s P’tit?” and “who killed Jenny?” These are important beats, but they’re mechanical, and any setting would struggle to hold up under their unending monotony.

I suspect that Donoghue, in researching Frog Music, never quite managed to overcome her innate academic (she holds a doctorate from Cambridge, in literature). Her descriptions are detailed and vivid; her depiction of a turbulent town and of its populace are overflowing with detail; and yet, like Frankenstein’s first few attempts at creating his monster, the essential lightning bolt that would bring her story to life never quite strikes.

What Donoghue does do, though, is brazenly (and well, mind you) present readers with a woman who’s not a “natural” mother — a woman whose first instincts, when faced with her child, conflict with her desire to be independent and wealthy. For once, even though Blanche develops some sort of quasi-attachment to P’tit, we see a female character driven more by ambition than purely by maternal love. In trying to solve the mystery of Jenny’s murder, Blanche has the time to conduct dalliances with wealthy clients — she is intensely pragmatic, not an emotional train-wreck who will give up everything for the love of her child.

This is an unusual depiction of a female character. Neither aggressively railing against patriarchy, nor throwing herself upon the altar of parenthood, Blanche could have been incredibly interesting — far more than the rather irritating Jenny Bonnet. Which is not to say that such characters don’t exist in other novels; there are many strong female characters in print, but there’s an unexplored, fascinating cast to Blanche’s personality. We never really find out why she’s so set on being an independent woman of means, or why Jenny’s questions about P’tit nettle her so. What drives her? What does she want? Donoghue flirts coquettishly with these questions, but like one of Blanche’s burlesque acts, stops short of actual revelation.

It’s actually a bit of a pity that Frog Music wasn’t published before Room. In Room, Donoghue demonstrated that she was fully capable of fleshing out massively compelling, engaging characters on a tiny canvas; in Frog Music, she seems to have inverted her approach, and the novel is all the lesser for it. Bright lights, big city are all well and good, but the lack of real chemistry between any of the characters in Frog Music reduces the novel from something potentially brilliant into something that you’d want to borrow, not buy.

Frog Music

(NOVEL)

By Emma Donoghue

Little, Brown and Company, US

ISBN 031632468X

416pp.