The Bees
Written by Laline Paull
Anyone in “Bee City” Asheville, especially if you are indeed a beekeeper or love honey, must read The Bees, wrritten by first-time novelist Laline Paull. I absolutely loved this book. It was so well written, astonishing actually, that I was heady from the thrill of it. It’s an adventure, a mystery, a love story—it’s got terrifying villains and mind-boggling challenges, lots of sex and loyalty that will bring you to tears.
The Bees is a wildly inventive, rapturous look at the world’s most ancient matrarchy—the beehive. The particular beehive in the story is located in an orchard in England, not too far away from farm lands and a small city. The culture of this beehive is based on ancient Cretan society in which women were held in high honor. The heroine is Flora 717, a lowly sanitation worker who has been blessed, some might say cursed, with talents from the higher classes. She can “talk” in the fiercely articulate language of antenna, scent and emotion. Her odd talents should by all rights get her killed as a freak but fate steps in. She starts her adventure by becoming one of many nursemaids, caring for the larvae in the huge nursery.
The beehive is an architectural wonder, similar to prehistoric mazes.. Based on the shape of a hexagon, it is divided into many chambers. First of course is the private quarters of the Queen, where she is waited on by several tribes of Sages or priestesses. There is the enormous “dance hall” where the returning forager bees are greeted by the others and dance out their complex directions to the finds of nectar. Here also come the drones—to strut in their sacred “maleness” and make the adoring females swoon. In the treasury are the cells where the precious honey is stored. In the panels in the “library” can be found the ancient myths that keep the spirit of the hive alive.
Flora 717 not only has experience in the nursery, but she also becomes a brave forager, revving up her “engine” on her overly large body and flying many miles every day to find nectar and tell her sisters where it can be found. More amazing than her bravery and ability to talk, Flora 717 discovers that she has “the flow,” meaning she is fertile, a fact she must keep secret from the fertility police because only the Queen herself is allowed to create young bees.
Everyone knows the strict rules of the ecstatic religion of the hive: Accept. Obey Serve. Every day, the extraordinary mother love of the Queen Bee emanates throughout the hive like a tantalizing chant and soothes her thousands of children and inspires them to do the jobs they’ve been ordained to do.
Flora 717’s adventures are as thrilling as any high-budget action movie. There are so many terrors for our bees – wasps and spiders, cold weather, endless rain, fields gone dry, terrible illness… not to mention the jealousy and treachery of other bees. (One enemy familiar to Ashevilleans that didn’t appear is a black bear.)
It doesn’t really matter how much of The Bees is biologically true, the lasting memories of the book make bees more real than you have ever imagined. The Bees has become a bestseller in both Europe and the U.S. – a surprise for a book about “bugs,” but no surprise for something written with such incredible passion and creativity. After you read this book, you will never look at a bee the same way again. And you’ll be convinced that we must take care of the bees as we take care of ourselves… because as the planet’s chief pollinator, the bees literally hold our lives in their wings.
The Bees, written by Laline Paull, Ecco/Harper Collins (2014), 340 pp.
An Event in Autumn: A Kurt Wallender Mystery
Written by Henning Mankell
Kurt Wallander is one of my favorite fictional police detectives–dark, lonely, brilliant. He always gets himself caught up in a tale that brings to light, sometimes as if it were escaping from underneath a rock, the best and worst of Swedish society. I love him in all his facets, both within the pages of Henning Mankell’s compelling novels, and in his cinematic versions, from Sweden with Krister Henriksson and Rolf Lassgard, and from England with Kenneth Branagh. If you like Kurt Wallender, I urge you to not only read al the Mankell novels but also watch the movies, both Swedish and English. It’s fascinating to see how the novels are translated to the screen and how different the Swedish and British versions are.
The latest published work is An Event in Autumn, a novella, written some time ago. In the story, Wallender finds a bony hand sticking up out of the garden in a house in the country he is planning to buy. Needless to say, clue searching takes precedence over house hunting. It’s a good, solid mystery, with ties to World War II, and Wallender’s daughter, Linda, makes one of her early appearances. It’s a fine, albeit slight, treat for Wallender fans. I read the audio version which was made enjoyable by the narration by Simon Vance. But the truth is, this work is just a trifle, it’s not long enough to really give the usual impact you expect from a Wallender story.
More important for fans who are also writers is what follows the novel – a long interview with Mankell about how he created the character of Wallander and what the crime story means to literature today. It’s fascinating and worth seeking out.
An Event in Autumn: A Kurt Wallender Mystery, written by Henning Mankell, narrated by Simon Vance, Random House Audio (2014) 3 CDs
Gone Girl: A Novel
Written by Gillian Flynn
Eight million copies – that’s right – eight million copies of Gone Girl have been sold – hardcover, paperback and audio. By most accounts, readers and critics alike have loved this book. It has gotten amazing, astonishing, sizzling critiques. I had to go to Amazon.com to see if anybody besides me in the entire world didn’t like this book–yes, a few hundred people had the same complaints I did. Whew, I’m not crazy. I’m just in a small minority.
First of all let me say I like Gillian Flynn’s writing. I discovered her by accident with her first book, Sharp Objects (2007), about a crime reporter who returns to her home town and must face her own demons before she can be a good journalist. At that time I felt she was a writer to watch. Her second book, Dark Places (2010), was another grim tale involved with the past. Gone Girl is only Flynn’s third novel, so this young woman (she’s in her 40s) has done quite well in a short period of time. Something to be lauded.
I enjoyed the first part of Gone Girl. Flynn’s style is speedy and contemporary and it does make you eager to turn the pages. Amy and Nick are both writers in New York but the recession means Nick loses his job, so the couple moves to small-town Missouri where Nick can make a living. They’re both good-looking and everybody assumes they are happily married. Except author Gillian Flynn, of course, who carefully reveals the cracking bricks that are going to bring down the wall of their togetherness.
One day Amy disappears and no one can find her. There’s blood and signs of a struggle. But did Nick really do away with his perfect-seeming wife? Just because he’s a liar and a cheat and a coward, does that mean he’s a killer? Halfway into the novel, I couldn’t care less—the characters were awful people and the “twist” was foreseeable a mile away and every few pages there was a scene that seemed to a have post-it saying “put an unbelievable twist in here.”
What other reviewers kept mentioning is that Gone Girl is more about discovering the truth of a marriage than uncovering who-dun-it. As such, it’s supposed to be more important than a mere crime story–you know, have higher literary merit and all that. Not necessarily. Shallow is still shallow no matter how many themes a novel has.
I’m waiting for the movie because I think Ben Affleck and the underrated, marvelous Rosamund Pike are going to give this story all the richness I didn’t get from the novel.
Gone Girl: A Novel, written by Gillian Flynn, Crown Publishing Group (2012) pp.432