Books
Poppy Adams: Moths and memories
11.02.08 Benedicte Page
Poppy Adams' début The Behaviour of Moths (Virago, May), which has already secured a two-week BBC Radio 4 "Book at Bedtime" slot and extensive foreign rights sales, had part of its genesis in a visit the author took to a decrepit stately pile near her mother's home in Devon. It was a Victorian folly, complete with an observatory and a bell-tower, and it was a near-ruin. "We looked around it—the roof was caving in and the windows were smashed," Adams recalls. "But when we went upstairs in one of the vast south rooms, there was a little single bed made up all on its own in the corner, and it had a floral eiderdown on it. The elderly woman who lived in the house had recently died; she had been there all her life and refused to move out."
The Behaviour of Moths is related by 70-year-old Ginny, who lives as a recluse in Bulburrow Court, the house where she grew up from childhood. As the novel opens, Ginny, who has a fascination with science and has spent her life studying moths, is expecting her first visitor for years: her sister Vivien, whom she hasn't seen for four decades.
The novel takes place over the course of a single weekend, during which Vivien arrives and Ginny is prompted to relive memories of the past. There's their childhood together at Bulburrow, their mother's sudden death, Vivien's departure into the outside world—and the request Vivien made of Ginny when she married and couldn't bear her husband a child. As the reader continues through the novel, it becomes clear that—without giving too much away—Ginny may not just be elderly and eccentric, but also a very unreliable narrator indeed.
Adams is herself a scientist, and had never written creatively before beginning the novel. "I haven't got secret journals, I've never written anything before in my life," she says. "I think it was sheer ignorance that made me think I could write a book. I did pure sciences for A-level, read natural sciences at Durham, and then joined the BBC and made medical and scientific documentaries."
But a break to have her children gave her the opportunity to try her hand at writing, as she'd always had a yen to do. With The Behaviour of Moths, she set herself a challenge: "I thought it would be really interesting to explore the idea that somebody had got herself wrong, and perceived herself in a completely different way to everybody else, and for it only to be at the end of her life that she is suddenly forced to realise she may have got it wrong. One of my goals was to make that convincing, and to play with the reader so that you don't know which of the characters is right."
The moths made a revealing counter-theme: "My husband used to breed them when he was little, and if you go for a walk in the countryside he's able to point out so many things, like cocoons, knowing which branches to look under. I specialised in biochemistry and neuroscience at Durham, and I've always been fascinated in that debate about consciousness—whether animals are aware of themselves or just acting on reflex and chemical reactions. The debate about consciousness and self-will is always changing, and I suppose my interest was to put forward the idea that perhaps we are doing a lot of things involuntarily as well."
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