The Secret Life of Bees is a book that I’d probably have never read except for this week's Four on Friday being a honey-themed show. And I’m glad I have. This is a magical coming-of-age tale that is not just about birds and the bees, but about finding your place in this world.
The book is set in South Carolina in 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act, which was a turbulent time in US history.
Fourteen-year-old Lily Owens lives on a isolated peach farm with her father, T Ray. Her mother died in mysterious circustances when she was just four and she spends her time yearning for her mother Deborah, wondering what she was like.
Her father, T Ray is a cruel and ignorant man: someone who thinks that Shakespeare’s first name is Julius and who punishes his daughter by making her kneel down for hours on grits. But the cruellest cut is telling Lily that she accientally killed her mother when she was four.
The only person who is kind and cares for her is the house maid, a black woman called Rosaleen. She walks to town with Rosaleen who plans to register for her vote but then Rosaleen is thrown in jail and beaten up. Lilly rescues her from the town and they run away. There they take refuge with three sisters August, May and June who harvest bees and sell honey under the label The Black Madonna. Through her relationship with these three very different women, Lily’s life is transformed and she also falls in love with a young man called Zach.
It's the bees' knees!
There is also the curious reversal of how Lily finds herself the only white person amongst this community and how she copes with that. And there’s the underlying tension that T Ray and the sherrif will one day come knocking at the door.
The Secret Life of Bees is a beautifully written story, a coming-of-age tale told from the point of view of Lily. In some ways it is evocative of other novels such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn with its magical description of the deep South and a tale told against the backdrop of racial tension. If at times it is in danger of being too sugary or sweet, Kidd pulls it back with some hard edged dialogue or a moving description of the landscape or a dipping into the wise young mind of Lily.
It is a moving book about growing up, falling in love and discovering your own true worth. And it's a book you'll read easily and quickly.
The Secret Life of Bees was Sue Monk Kidd's first novel. It was first published in 2002 and was an instant best-seller and inevitably made into a movie. Some critics stated that it was too female and without any strong male charcters but the strength of the narrative voice makes this a story for all, regardless of age or gender.
Kidd herself grew up in a small town in the Deep South (South Georgia) and was an adolescent in 1964. Honeybees did actually live in the wall of the house where she grew up and it was that truth that gave her the idea for The Secret Life of Bees. But she knew nothing much else about bees and had to research extensively before writing the novel.
The Fear Index - Robert Harris
The Fear Index is a thriller that is as topical as last night’s news. It takes one of the greatest crises of the age, the banking crisis, and turns it into a page-turner. It’s bang up to date with even has a piece about riots on the streets of Athens and Harris has written a compelling thriller in which the bankers are the baddies.
It is set in Geneva – the world’s financial hub. The central character is a brilliant physicist called Alexander Hoffmann who has set up a hedge fund and uses artificial intelligence to makes vast sums of money by trading on the financial markets. This is effectively a super computer that can predict what will happen with the markets far more accurately than any human mind. At one point Hoffman wakes up, looks at the markets and calculates that his super machine has made him $3 million since he went to bed. But all that money and security is about to unravel in a tale of the unexpected.
The book opens with a scene of finger-chewing tension. An intruder breaks into Hoffmann’s fortress-like villa in Geneva and assaults him. After that Hoffman is not the same man. As he set sets out to discover who is intent on destroying him – this incident sets in train other events that send the markets into turmoil and drives Hoffman into his own personal hell.
Even if you don’t know a hedge fund from a hedgehog, you’ll still be thrilled by The Fear Index. In fact Harris himself didn’t even know what a hedge fund was before he started researching this book. The thing is that Harris can write a brilliant tale – even when writing about characters who work as physicists and hedge fund experts.
The book might sound like science fiction but it is in part based on fact and in high finance they have been working on developing an artificial intelligence that can accurately predict the markets far beyond the capacity of the human mind.
In this way The Fear Index predicts a market that creates its own Frankenstein’s Monster – a creation that might promise great things but ultimately destroys all.
Fox Film snapped up the rights to The Fear Index having read only six of the book’s nineteen chapters and Harris is now rated the most bankable British writer in Hollywood.
Paul Greengrass, the filmmaker who made Bloody Sunday and the best Bourne movies (The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum) has been signed on to direct the movie and Harris himself will write the screenplay.
Donal O'Donoghue
