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It is the lightness of Fiona Shaw’s touch that proves to be the most impressive quality of her highly recommendable latest novel, 'Tell it to the Bees'.
As the reader is carried back to the 1950s, there is an authenticity to the time-setting that goes beyond stereotype. By not depending on the overuse of gramophones and the like, Shaw is able to avoid the novel becoming a nostalgic tribute to the 50s. The narrative of Tell it to the Bees moves fluently between its three central characters: Lydia Weekes, Charlie, her son, and Jean Markham, a woman who has defied the expectations of the time by becoming a doctor.
The initial driving force behind the novel was Shaw’s questioning of what it would be like to be a woman with a child, living in the 50s, that falls in love with another woman. During the collapse and ending of Lydia’s marriage, Charlie and Jean form an unlikely friendship based on the bees that Jean keeps in her garden. With this friendship an intimacy between Lydia and Jean develops; an intimacy that will change the course of all three of their lives forever.
Just as this novel isn’t about being set in the 1950s, the novel isn’t solely about the difficulties of being in a same-sex relationship in either that time or perhaps even this time. Indeed what makes the stand against homophobia so strong is that the relationship between Lydia and Jean is simply about two people who completely fall in love.
But the novel also reaches the reader by the attempts of its often lonely characters to reach out to one another, and the barriers preventing this. For me the most touching moment of the novel is when Charlie intends to spell out to the bees in plain and simple words what has being going on in his life, perhaps with the clear words that the people and situations around him have deprived him of. Tell it to the Bees asks what we tell each other and to whom we tell it, but it also asks what we hear from each other, or rather, what we are willing to hear at all.
Tell it to the Bees is published by Tindal Street Press and is available nation wide at £9.99.
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