Here is the Beehive
Here is the Beehive by Sarah Crossan is one of our fiction recommendations for April. Here is the Beehive is Sara Crossan’s first novel for adults and is published by Bloomsbury Circus. Crossan is an award-winning children’s book author and was the Laureate na nÓg (Children’s Literature Laureate) from 2018 to 2019.
You know the score if you have read our other reviews: when writing about a book I think it is helpful to include the blurb as this is what folks might first read if they picked up this book in a bookshop or in your local library. Maybe someday I will explain why I think this is so important. Mostly it is because I have been burned by the difference between how a publisher describes a book and how a reader describes a book. Anyway, we are told of Here is the Beehive:
Ana and Connor have been having an affair for three years. In hotel rooms and coffee shops, swiftly deleted texts and briefly snatched weekends, they have built a world with none but the two of them in it.
But then the unimaginable happens, and Ana finds herself alone, trapped inside her secret.
How can we lose someone the world never knew was ours? How do we grieve for something no no else can ever find out? In her desperate bid for answers, Ana seeks out the shadowy figure who has always stood just beyond her reach - Connor’s wife Rebecca.
Peeling away the layers of two overlapping marriages, Here is the Beehive is a devastating excavation of risk, obsession and loss.
It is difficult to say that I enjoyed this book because it is heavy and the characters are complex and at times intensely unlikable, but those are the exact reasons that this book was so impactful. Our narrator is Ana, a lawyer who meets Connor, a married man when he comes in to sort out some legal issues. They begin an affair that we see only through Ana’s eyes as we learn on the first page that Connor has suddenly passed. Ana is an unreliable narrator at best and at worst is obsessive and skirting at mania. Because of the secret of their affair, Ana can’t tell anyone that she is grieving. We watch as she slowly unravels into herself as she starts to try to get close to Connor’s wife Rebecca.
The tension is held throughout the entire book. As Ana circles closer to Rebecca, taking bigger risks to embed herself in Connor’s life, I caught myself holding my breath. Ana begins to pull away from her own life and it feels like everything could come crashing down at any moment due to her recklessness.
Recently, I put together a writing inspiration prompt called Be the Villain. In this prompt, I asked that people reflect on the role they plan in other people’s stories. When we are in conflict with another person we think of ourselves as the good guy but in the other person’s version, we could be the villain. In this book, Connor is sometimes the villain and at times we see that Ana has been the villain too and might still even be the villain to the people in her life that she is neglecting as she processes her secret grief. It was this messiness that kept me reading.
The structure of this book was also really interesting. It was written as small vignettes that flipped between the present day and pivotal moments in her and Connor’s affair. At times it looks like poetry on the page. These brief moments really capture the nature of their relationship and the fragmentation of Ana’s life as she spirals. It is in these moments that we catch glimpses of Ana’s relationships with her family, her parent’s marriage, and when she first met her husband Paul. Within each of these moments, we get breadcrumbs to help build a picture of these characters. Still, we are never given enough information to convict or applaud any of the characters, everyone is flawed and everything is complicated.
Ana tells us that she won’t cry until she has read Anna Karenina twice, and throughout the book, we see the echos of the scandalous affair between Anna and Vronsky in Ana’s attempt to steer her three-year-long affair with Connor toward a happy ending. I loved this book because of its raw outlook and refusal to wrap things up in a clean and tidy way. Crossan took a fairly common narrative of an affair and made it gripping and unique. Check it out and let me know what you think.
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