Review by New York Times Review
bees are weird. The peculiar mating rituals, the doomed drones who wait all their lives for a single sexual encounter with an omnipotent queen, leading to immediate death. As humans, we find them fascinating: perhaps the only species whose gender politics are more screwed up than our own. In "The Honey Farm," the debut novel by the Canadian writer Harriet Alida Lye, the inner workings of a bee colony become an eerie metaphor for communal living gone awry. At the center of the novel is Silvia, a recent university graduate who replies to an exuberant online ad for "THE HONEY FARM. Free retreat for artists, writers, thinkers! " It's unclear which category Silvia belongs to, but she is nonetheless offered room and board in exchange for work on the farm. It seems, at first, an idyllic setting: Think Yaddo with bees. Running the show is the mysterious Cynthia, the farm's proprietor and queen bee, who supervises the chores that occupy most of the day. The residents - two brothers who make documentary films, a French Canadian artist couple and Ibrahim, a driven young painter from Toronto, among others - are shocked to find that the farm has no internet access, no cellphone signal. Its only link to the outside world is a phone booth at the end of the lane. It's a satisfying setup, reminiscent of an Agatha Christie mystery, the entire cast of characters marooned together in an exotic locale. Strange events ensue. Silvia drinks from a garden hose and finds the water blood-colored. The group is afflicted with head lice. A swim in a murky pond disturbs an unimaginable number of frogs, which soon infiltrate the house. The incidents seem related to an unprecedented drought that's making the bees anxious. Clearly, evil is afoot. The writing is uneven, but Lye is at her best when describing the natural world. "By the end of June, the fuzzy-headed clover will have finished its season," she writes. "The bees will have sucked the purple straws dry." Her fascination with apian life and the little-known techniques of beekeeping give rise to the most memorable scenes in the novel, as when Silvia learns to harvest royal jelly from the hive. Raised in a conservative Christian home, Silvia seems younger than her years. Her innocence is believable, but her passivity is narratively problematic. She is a character to whom life simply happens. She drifts into a love affair with Ibrahim and feels guilty about not telling her parents. She sleeps a great deal and has cryptic dreams. The story gathers momentum when, to her utter astonishment, she finds herself pregnant - a fact she discovers only when a clerk in a grocery store inexplicably hands her a pregnancy test she doesn't ask or pay for. Ever obedient, Silvia finds a restroom and pees on the stick. The story takes a dark turn when Cynthia shows a disturbing interest in Silvia's unborn baby, building to a climax that should be harrowing, but isn't, since Silvia lacks the drive to save herself or even understand the nature of the danger she's in. When it comes to creating suspense, "The Honey Farm" succeeds almost too well. The unexplained phenomena of early summer, so vividly rendered, in the end amount to nothing. The drought eases, the bloody water clears and the frogs are gone as quickly as they appeared. In the end, the novel doesn't deliver on its sinister promise. "It starts with the bees," the spooky prologue tells us, "and it'll end this way too." If only that were true. ? JENNIFER HAIGH is the author, most recently, of "Heat and Light."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 8, 2018]