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Secret Life of Bees
This New York Times bestseller, however, transcends the normal pattern of loving mothers and reticent daughters, squabbling sisters and insolent friends and goes to that one aspect of living, which is the encompassing lesson that life actually teaches—find love within oneself. Set in the American South in 1964 with the Civil Rights Movement at its peak with intense racial unrest and a determined black population rising forward to recognise what is due to them, the novel touches on the historical, geographic and socio-political milieu of the time. At this precise moment, Lily Owens, a neglected "white" 14-year-old spends her time going to school where she is looked upon as odd and spends her spare time selling her father’s peaches on the highway. Lily lives with her father who is strangely resentful of her presence and Lily herself lives the dark knowledge of having killed her own mother at a young age. Living with this intemperate guilt, sorrow and yearning for a mother whom she senses and remembers desperately, Lily is growing up with her African-American Nanny, a robust and outspoken woman who loves this desolate child. Rosaleen, the nanny, in an attempt to exercise her new-found right to vote, takes on three of the meanest racist bullies in town and in facing this backlash finds herself running away with Lily leading the way. Lily has it all planned. They must go to Tiburon in South Carolina where her mother’s past is hovering in her heart in the form of a secret knowledge. It is here that Lily encounters three coloured bee-keeping sisters who introduce Lily to the secret lives of bees. The book written as a first person account speaks of Lily loving "the idea of bees having a secret life, just like the one I was living". Woven through the living and nurturing aspect of bees, of wise insights and detailed descriptions of the wonderful world of apiaries—"August had a fish aquarium turned upside down with a giant piece of honey comb inside it. Honey had oozed out and had formed puddles on the tray underneath", the author strings this narrative of a young girl’s longing to discover her mother and in her moment of disclosure Lily learns that love can come from many directions. This is essentially a story about the power of women. Of finding the compassion, the efficacy to deal with pain and loss in a unique "female" way—by spreading the blanket of warmth and enveloping the hurt amongst one another. Lily, in her little life, unearths life’s momentous upheavals—a cruel father, a nasty world, death, sadness, adolescent love and friends. The book has been written simply and effortlessly. The author does not seem to be trying to write laborious descriptions keeping them lucent—"The sun had baked everything to perfection; even the gooseberries on the fence had fried to raisins." This is interspersed with revelations: The concept of the Black Madonna, "Everybody needs a god who looks like them;" the strange world of three coloured women making honey and selling it to the intolerant, deeply resentful world they live in and their fantastic, fierce and unswerving friends. Through its moving pages, the author sums it all up. "The problem (with people) is they know what matters, but they don’t choose it." Indeed, it is a tale that can be devoured in one sitting, for there is a Lily there to be found in all of us. Lily’s zest for her mother is what makes this novel unique as it weaves through a small life in a large picture of the world. |
A
young girl watches bees "squeezing through the cracks" of her
bedroom walls and "bees as a symbol of the soul: of death and
rebirth" is the essence of this wonderfully lucid novel. The book
deals with the subject of women—mothers and daughters, sisters and
girlfriends—the strength and endurance these remarkable relationships
provide.