Poppy Adams, The Behaviour of Moths (Virago 2009)
Ginny is waiting for her sister Vivi in the crumbling family manse. They are from a long line of lepidopterists (butterfly and moth collectors). Now they are both old.
She looks back on their childhood, wondering what it was that changed everything. Vivi had slipped off the belltower 59 years ago and ruptured her womb. That was the start of it.
‘What have you done with the furniture,’ says Vivi, ‘all that priceless furniture?’
‘I didn’t sell any of the moths,’ she replies.
She becomes, almost by destiny, ‘the Moth Woman’. Clive does experiments to find out ‘what makes a moth a moth’. He believes that moths—and other animals—have no awareness, only instinct. With his new Robinson’s trap, he catches a Nomophila noctuella.
Vivi grills Ginny on the manner of their mother’s death—she had fallen down the stairs—but Vivi had not known their mother was a drunk. As Ginny, Vivi and Arthur conduct their own experiments on propagation and metamorphosis, Ginny struggles to keep secrets from everyone, only to find they have kept secrets from her.
A beautiful and innovative Gothic-style tale. There’s not so much plot action-wise; it is mostly the story of the relationship between two sisters as it evolves and the tangled webs they weave. I really loved the metaphorical parallels between the metamorphosis of moths and the cycle of human gestation, birth and death. Woven into these themes are stories of historical debates and experiments in lepidoptery during the period.
After reading this, I’m a little less disgusted by moths.
Susie Helme 
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