Is it too early for Book of the Year contender? We review Here is the Beehive.
Beehive – the blurb
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 one 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.
Nearly passed me by
I had a proof of this book passed to me as Crossan was a YA author and I was a YA reader. Despite Here is the Beehive being Crossan’s first adult novel. I nearly didn’t read it at all, the cover of the proof copy is a very uninspiring white. But having realised I hadn’t read too many books published in 2020 I picked it up and perused. To my surprise it was in verse and set out…sporadically. Short sentences spaced out across the pages. Paragraphs almost like individual poems (check out Anna Karenina, page 1). It intrigued me, so I read it, in a day, and loved it.
Quiet bombshells
I immediately took to the style of the book (although I can appreciate it wont be some people’s cup of tea). I found the prose opened the text up to more emotion. Stripped of any context and unnecessary detail all that was left was the visceral feelings of Ana as we followed her down the rabbit hole. The book skips around and Crossan gives you very little by way of marker stones, I liked having to concentrate and occasionally read back a paragraph or two. It wasn’t too hard to follow and further explanation would have detracted too much from Ana’s despair.
Let’s get one thing straight, Ana is not a nice person. As the book develops and more of her life is revealed I liked her even less. But by this point you are part of her pain and so you follow. Crossan dropped bombshell after bombshell, quietly, just slotted them in to the text meaning you read a sentence or two before you stop and go ‘hang on, what did she just reveal?’ Truly powerful stuff.
Sucker punch
I can’t review Beehive without touching on the emotional devastation it delivers. Grief, anger, despair, love. I could quote so many lines that pulled at the heart strings for so many different reasons. I’m forcing my fingers to stop thumbing through the book to find more to not quote! Reading parts back now in little snatches it still sucker punches me. As a work of poetry it’s brilliant, yet it works as a novel so well. I’m going to have to go out and buy it as a book this good cannot just sit on my shelf in proof form. I might have to track down a book or two from her earlier writing (I’ve heard Toffee is good, anyone?) If they are half as good as Beehive they will be bloody brilliant.
I couldn’t leave it alone, just like bees are drawn to the beehive, and Ana was to Connor. I inhaled it. Read of the Year? It is so far. .
