Here is the Beehive by Sarah Crossan

Review by Han Clark

It is a story about the power of lies.
It is a story about learning to embrace our individual truths.
It is a redemptive story.
It is a story in which the only hope is to crash and burn quickly.

Ana and Connor were in love, and they were married. To other people.
Their love story took place in bars, in hotel rooms, in spits and bursts.
In secret.
For three years.
And then Connor died.
This is where Here Is the Beehive begins.

I consumed Sarah Crossan’s hypnotic novel in a single evening.
It is addictive, like the love it portrays.
It is devastating, like every human relationship contained within its pages.
Written in fractured verse, the story dances around the page. It passes between Ana’s grief-stricken internal monologue, in which she speaks to Conor, remembering their time together.
And the ‘real’ world that is moving around her, unaware of her secret devastation.

Here Is The Beehive revels in the ugliness of obsession and how far beyond ourselves we will go to cling to love. Because, make no mistake, these characters do cling to their uncomfortable circumstances.
Conor gaslights Ana, making her question her sanity. He betrays her again, and again. He leaves her.
Ana threatens Conor; she teases the potential destruction of his life. She hates him. She leaves him.
This is to say nothing of the hell they put their spouses and children through.
For years.

And yet…
Like magnets they return to each other, over and over again.
These are not likeable people.
And yet…

Crossan skilfully reveals her characters’ vulnerabilities. She shows, via Ana’s fragmented memories, the humanity behind the immorality.
It is not just what is on the page.
It is all the things that are left unsaid. All the justifications glimpsed.
Like silver fish darting through murky water.

Crossan makes no attempt to steer the reader’s judgement. It is not important. Those of us who have endured (clung to) difficult entanglements may read sympathetically.
Or maybe not.
Whatever.

Like its protagonist, the story is what it is and, thankfully, it makes no apologies for it.
To that end, it is reminiscent of Eimear McBride’s Strange Hotel from earlier this year: a similarly sharp and humanistic tale of grief and self-discovery in middle-age, that re-casts motherhood as an off-shoot of the female experience, rather than its traditional place as the central pillar.

Here is the Beehive is Sarah Crossan’s first novel for adults.

Here is the beehive.
Where are the bees?

Here is the Beehive is published by Bloomsbury, 20th August 2020

www.bloomsbury.com/uk/here-is-the-beehive-97815266

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