Deborah Moggach was born in 1948 in the UK’s Lake District and brought up in Bushey, Hertfordshire. She is one of four daughters of writers Charlotte and Richard Hough Moggach. Deborah Moggach studied English at Bristol University and worked at the Oxford University Press. In the second half of the nineteen seventies she lived in Karachi, Pakistan for two years, during which she wrote articles for Pakistani newspapers as well as her first novel,You Must Be Sisters. She also worked as a waitress, taught riding and trained as a teacher before getting married.
Moggach is a prolific and acclaimed writer. She has received three awards, has been Chair of the Society of Authors, worked for PEN’s Executive Committee and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In February 2005, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by her Alma Mater, the University of Bristol, and an OBE for services to literature and drama.
She has adapted several of her novels for television dramas and written film scripts. She has two adult children and three grandchildren. She lives between London and her cottage on the coast in Kent. Her daughter, Lottie Moggach, is also a writer.
Tulip Fever, published in 1999 and released as a film in 2017, is a historical fiction set in the seventeenth-century Golden Age of Amsterdam. The old widower, Cornelis van Sandvoort, who has lost his first wife and two sons, is a prosperous pepper merchant betrothed for the second time to the very young, beautiful, penniless Sophia.
He lives comfortably but longs for an heir to complete his blissful life with his much-loved wife, who has no loving feelings for him apart from being grateful that he saved her family from destitution. “When they were first betrothed, Sophia was a lively, happy girl, but over the months, she has grown more withdrawn”.
While waiting for his heir to arrive, with God’s will, he summons a recommended upcoming young painter called Jan van Loos to immortalise his portrait next to his good-looking wife in their sitting room. Sparks fly between Van Loos and Sophia, which grow into an irresistible desire for each other or, more like, infatuation and lust.
Sophia is a bored housewife and Van Loos is a philanderer, excited about a new conquest, which is a contrast to the deep love and understanding between the Sandvoort’s servant, Maria and her lover, the local fishmonger, Willem, both of whom plan to marry and have several children.
The novel’s title, Tulip Fever, is misleading since the story concentrates mainly on a mundane love triangle drama of a young, beautiful wife married to an older man and cuckolding him with a younger one. It only scantily touches on the tulip mania of the time. Moreover, it ends on a moral, religious retribution to underline the consequences of sin versus virtue and how to achieve redemption.
In her story, the author misses the opportunity to develop the historically well-known, most significant market bubble crash caused by the lack of predictability or stability in the tulip bulb market. Consequently, the market was unsustainable and crashed, ruining the country’s economy and pushing several people to suicide.
Despite Jan Van Loos and Sophia’s careful, cunning plan, all their savings are lost, not because of the seventeenth-century economic impact of a wild, free-market financial bubble bursting – a well-known historical event, and not because of the tulip mania’s speculative frenzy escalating the price of tulip bulbs to exorbitant levels with a single Semper Augustus tulip bulb selling for a price exceeding the cost of a large mansion. Instead, Sophia and Van Loos’s plan collapses because Van Loos’ most trusted dimwit servant, Gerrit, eats the Semper Augustus tulip bulb mistaking it for a regular cooking onion.
The novel is divided into short chapters following the main protagonists’ deeds, thoughts and standpoints. Nonetheless, it fails to depict the characters in depth, leaving the reader without empathy for them because they appear one-dimensional. The “passion” between Jan Van Loos and Sophia seems thrown in hastily without prior preparation, making the love scenes feel unconvincing and shallow. The author’s use of unrefined words describing the sex scenes, like “dampness between the legs”, “joystick”, and “lover’s seed”, do not enhance sensuality nor romanticism but are childish at best.
Tulip Fever interweaves fiction with historical facts and has vivid period details of seventeenth- century Amsterdam with its culture, buzzing streets, and famous painters commissioned to paint portraits of wealthy families, as was the trend at the time. The novel is an easy read with twists and turns. Interestingly, since the Dutch first imported tulip bulbs from the Turks in the fifteenth century during the Ottoman Empire, the tulip has remained the Netherlands’ national icon and their most-loved flower.
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