About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

THE DEATH OF BEES
by Lisa O'Donnell
Harper, January 2013
320 pages
$25.99
ISBN: 0062209841


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

THE DEATH OF BEES opens with an arresting statement: "Today is Christmas Eve. Today is my birthday. Today I am fifteen. Today I buried my parents in the backyard. Neither of them were beloved." The speaker is Marnie, an academically gifted, foul-mouthed young woman determined to survive in a deprived area of Glasgow and equally determined to see to it that neither she nor her decidedly odd younger sister Nellie winds up in care. She means to keep the deaths of her parents hidden until she turns sixteen and can legally assume charge over her own life and that of her sister. The novel describes what happens in the course of that year.

The back garden where the parents uneasily lie is overlooked by the man next door, Lennie, the neighbourhood pariah as he has been labelled a sex offender as a result of a myopic encounter in the park with a local and under-aged rent boy. It's an episode of which Lennie remains deeply ashamed. Lennie's long-term partner has died relatively recently and Lennie is still mourning his loss, bewildered about how to go on living in his absence and in the light of his local notoriety as a paederast. His only companion is his dog, which in the time-honoured tradition, seems determined to dig up the bodies in the garden next door.

If the opening appears to promise some sort of Glaswegian Gothic, what develops is very different. But the reader should be prepared that this is also by no means a naturalistic novel. Although it has been suggested that Marnie and Nellie could be the offspring of characters in an Irvine Welsh novel, moved to Glasgow but still hooked on heroin, THE DEATH OF BEES is cast in a somewhat different mould.

Marnie is very clever, streetwise, and self-reliant. But from time to time she displays in inexplicable social sophistication that is hard altogether to account for. How, for example, does she know that the parents of the boy she's selling drugs to, a smart pair who work in the media, are likely to call themselves Buddhists, serve green tea, and eat only organic vegetables? Her sister Nellie has adapted not by tackling the outside world head-on but by retreating into a kind of genteel fantasy world of words. She speaks, we're told, "like the Queen of England," but the Queen would be Victoria, not Elizabeth II. Her language, a kind of disturbing hybrid of Angela Brazil crossed with a second-rate late Victorian romantic novelist, appears to serve as a buffer between herself and a world that is harsh and frightening. She is, moreover, a gifted violinist. Neither, then, is simply a grubby, terrified victim of abuse and deprivation. Far from it.

All the same, the sisters want a family, if one on their own terms. Lennie, lonely and isolated, fills the gap for a while, but circumstances will prevent him from taking on the task permanently. A sinister born-again grandfather emerges and Nellie, anxious for the stability of a real family, is far too quick to accept him at face value. He has had a bad track record as a father and both Marnie and the reader suspect that he is up to no good at all, for all his protestations of remorse and religion.

Lisa O'Donnell is Scottish-born film scriptwriter now living in Los Angeles, where she's evidently been long enough to pick up some stray American idioms. Despite the evident grimness of its subject matter, the book is essentially warm-hearted, teetering sometimes perilously close to sentimentality, but usually managing to pull back in time. Unless they are particularly sensitive to rude language, readers who generally avoid the grittier end of the spectrum need not worry that they are in for a rougher ride than they prefer. Though there's a fair bit of crime going on in THE DEATH OF BEES, it is not really crime fiction in the usual sense, although the author does develop a fair amount of suspense over the ultimate fate to the girls.. What it is, however, is a very engaging coming-of-age novel that allows for a broad definition of family, one that in the end values the ties of affection over those of blood. All in all, a very promising debut.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, December 2012

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]