A dark undercurrent flutters through 'The Sister'

Who cares about moths? Butterflies undergo that remarkable transformation from ugly earthbound crawlers to lovely airborne vagabonds. But moths are drab nuisances, so who needs them?

The Stones - the family at the heart of "The Sister," Poppy Adams' masterly neo-Gothic novel - do. For Clive, the father, moths are so engrossing that he sometimes gets up from the table with his meal half-eaten to go check on a moth-centered experiment in his upstairs laboratory. He's so preoccupied, in fact, that he becomes an unwitting enabler of the alcoholism to which his wife, Maud, is succumbing. Their older daughter, Ginny, shares her father's passion. Only the other child, Ginny's sister, Vivien, seems unaffected by the collecting and research going on in and around Bulburrow Court, the family manse in the English countryside.

Moths, it so happens, have many of the same fascinating attributes as butterflies. Perhaps even more fascinating, as this passage about moths' maturation suggests: "If you cut through a cocoon in mid-winter, a thick creamy liquid will spill out, and nothing more. What goes into that cocoon in autumn is a caterpillar and what comes out in spring is entirely different - a moth, complete with papery wings, hairlike legs and antennae. Yet this same creature spends winter as a gray-green liquid, a primordial soup. The miraculous meltdown of an animal into a case of fluid chemicals and its exquisite re-generation into a different animal, like a stupendous jigsaw, was a feat that, far from putting him off, fed Clive's obsession."

The narrator of the above passage (and the book as a whole) is Ginny, now about 70 and still living in Bulburrow Court. Her parents are long since dead, and most of the great house is closed off to save on heating costs. Ginny still putters around with moths and generally keeps to herself. In fact, she seems a bit dotty.

Ginny is no innocent, however. To alleviate the pain of arthritis, she drinks cannabis tea. And soon enough, the reader learns that she had a child with her brother-in-law, Vivien's husband. This came about because of an accident that happened when the two women were girls. After stealing upstairs through one of the mansion's hidden passageways, they were fooling around when Vivien lost her balance and fell, injuring her womb so badly that she had to have a hysterectomy. Although Vivien is younger, Ginny has always been in thrall to her, and several years later, still single, she agreed to give Vivien a child by going to bed with Vivien's husband.

Ginny is filling in this background now because Vivien has suddenly returned after an absence of almost 50 years. For reasons she keeps to herself, she has shown up at the Court, intending to live out the rest of her days there. At first, Ginny is happy to have her sister back. But soon Vivien becomes a handful, not least because she insists on challenging Ginny's strongly held version of the family dynamics when they were growing up.

With its stylish prose, taut plotting and dark psychology, "The Sister" is reminiscent of the best books by Ruth Rendell's alter ego, Barbara Vine. And it comes with a bonus: that storehouse of information about moths. After reading this remarkably assured first novel, you may find yourself looking at those poor cousins to butterflies with a new sense of respect and fear.

"The Sister"

Author: Poppy Adams

Publisher: Knopf, $23.95