Whisper Of The Moon Moth by Lindsay Jayne Ashford

I was a little hesitant reading this novel at first as a fictionalised reimagining of a real life feels so many shades of wrong.  However, I decided to give it a fair crack of the whip and decided to treat it as though the people within the covers had never really existed and it was all fiction.  This is surprisingly easy to do, especially if you know absolutely nothing about Merle Oberon.  To me she was merely a name from the end of the Golden Era in filmmaking and I'm not even sure that I have seen her in a film - I know her most famous film was perhaps Wuthering Heights but as I don't particularly like the novel I haven't been in any rush to see an adaptation of it.

The tale itself is gloriously wrought.  The early section, in India, where the young Estelle lives with her mataji, Charlotte, is particularly evocative.  You can feel the heat and smell the spice laden air wafting from the pages.  The character of Estelle is particularly empathetic and her naivety from her rather cloistered upbringing in the Anglo-Indian quarter is at eternal odds with both her ambition and her underlying sensuous nature.  Whether Merle Oberon was really like this I have no idea but I kind of hope she was; there is a feisty fearlessness to her that makes you immediately warm to her and accept her character flaws without them diminishing your affection for the character.

Whilst only just "pale enough to pass" this doesn't stop her from following her dreams and travelling to England with a letter of recommendation in her pocket and love in her heart.  Sadly the love was misplaced and the intended recipient of the letter away but by a string of fortuitous meetings she still manages to make the right connections by meeting with Sandor Korda who sees her potential and so a star is born.

I found this to be a real page turner and was quite sad when it finishes early in Merle's life after her marriage to Korda.  Whilst the events are fictionalised the inspiration behind the author's imaginings is explained in the Afterword and the known biography of Ms Oberon is synopsied there for the reader.  All of the characters in the book live and breathe and this isn't because there is a "name" attached to them; indeed many of them behave in ways that you wouldn't expect (although Vivien Leigh's overvaulting ambition and spite are well recorded) and feel all the more real for it.

If you can seperate the real person from the fictional account then you will enjoy this novel.  The settings, both glamorous and mundane, are richly evoked and the populace of the pages live and breathe on their own.  There are some twists and turns in the plot that you genuinely don't see coming but when all mixed together they just make it feel like a genuine life.