Caryl Lewis’s self-confessed obsession with bees lies behind the second novel she’s written in the English language.
Bitter Honey is a tale of grief, friendship and new beginnings set at Berllan Deg, an orchard farm in the Welsh countryside. The farm and its cottage become a refuge for three women at different stages of their lives, helping them to make sense of their pasts and the possibilities for new futures.
Berllan Deg has always been Hannah’s home, first as a child and then a wife. Her father planted the rows of apple trees and her husband John introduced the bee hives. He was a writer who came to understand the world through the language of bees.
The book opens shortly after John’s death. When Hannah’s estranged sister Sadie returns to Berllan Deg for the funeral, she discovers 11 letters John has written for Hannah. reflecting on their married life and his regret that for a time he lost sight of the woman he once loved.
Within these letters is also a revelation that causes Hannah to question everything she thought she knew about her marriage.
These letters act as the novel’s structural framework, each one focusing on different behaviours exhibited by the bees as seasons change.
According to the publishers, the number of letters exactly matches the 11 frames in a bee’s nest. Maybe that parallel helped the author by giving shape to her narrative during the writing process, but as a reader, the significance was lost on me. It didn’t make any material difference to how I read or understood the narrative.
What was more evident — a little too obvious unfortunately — was that the bee hive is a metaphor for Berllan De. Each letter draws a parallel between the life inside a hive and a life that John wants to encourage Hannah to embrace as an antidote to grief.
In one letter John writes:
Bees that are occupied and content are at ease, and they have choices … They can guard the entrance, they can be architects, mathematicians, geographers, they can collect pollen, nectar; they can nurture the young or fight the enemy. … the only thing they need is to find a passion for something and with that they can exist within life. Without it they perish.
The idea of the hive as a metaphor for the stages of human life runs throughout the novel. In one of his letters, John expresses his sorrow that unlike his bees, he lost the ability to communicate with the people around him, particularly Hannah. He was too wrapped up in his work — there was always another book waiting to be written.
In another letter, he reflects on his imminent death:
The bees do not sleep, not like other creatures which hibernate – they merely begin to live more slowly, gathering closer when the coldest weather strikes. My cluster is final, Hannah; I do not think that a new spring awaits me.
Caryl Lewis takes us deep into the emotional life of her characters, showing how Hannah’s raw grief in the first few days after John’s death, gives way to feelings of sense of hurt and betrayal. But just like the bees she survives; finding strength in the companionship of her sister Sadie and a young woman who comes to the farm in search of answers and ends up staying.
Bitter Honey is a very lyrical novel, wonderfully capturing the changes in the natural world as one season gives way to another. I particularly enjoyed the scene where all three women bring in the apple harvest and Hannah sees the bees emerge from their dormant winter to begin once more the process of making honey.