Theme: Favourite Playwrights

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best playwrights, bookgroup, online book club, plays, playwrights, theatre

It seems quite poignant looking at this theme now, when theatres have been closed for 4 months due to the Covid-19 pandemic. But let us celebrate our favourite playwrights and look forward to a time when we can enjoy their work live in theatres again.

Kay:

I chose this theme as going to the theatre is one of my favourite things to do. A good live play is the thing that most excites me culturally and in ‘normal’ times I go to the theatre on average one and a half times a month (I know because I keep a record of all I see in the back of my diaries and award plays my own star rating!). It’s been interesting that I’ve had no interest – despite recommendations from friends – in watching recordings of plays from the National Theatre and other theatres during Lockdown. Partly because I’d seen so many of them already but also because a theatre outing is, for me, more than the play itself. I choose what to see based on playwrights and actors (I usually book too early to pick up reviews), but the experience of live performance, when the play and production are good, and tension and excitement fizzes in the air, is part of the pleasure for me. And I do most definitely have favourite playwrights – but where to start!

The most obvious place is Shakespeare. Would one be allowed to leave him out and be taken seriously! Seeing a Shakespeare play nowadays is a very different experience to my school days and I welcome the change. Now words are spoken to be understood rather than said by rote, and thus Shakespeare’s genius emerges more smoothly and engagingly. I remember seeing Hamlet when I was studying it for A Level and don’t have good memories, but the National Theatre production a few years ago with Rory Kinnear as Hamlet was a revelation. He spoke as if the words had meaning and all was easily understood. I thought it was so good, I bought more tickets and went back with my kids, saying, You have to see this. I saw Ralph Feinnes as Richard III at the Almeida in 2016. My friends had bought front row seats and I could have almost reached out and touched Feinnes. He was extraordinary (5*). There have been disappointments, a Macbeth at the NT a couple of years ago, but a brilliant Twelfth Night there in 2017 (5*). Perhaps I need to move on to another playwright now but can’t leave Shakespeare without mentioning Ian McKellen’s fantastic King Lear in 2018 (5*). In some ways I feel I’ve only come to appreciate Shakespeare in later life and I’m really enjoying the experience of getting to know him better. I think it’s a never-ending journey – the more you see one of his plays, the more you get from it.

If asked to name my No.1 favourite playwright though, it would have to be Arthur Miller. I did see a disappointing Death of a Salesman at the Young Vic last year and gave it 3*; I’ve seen better productions. There was a bit of a Miller revival going on so I’ve seen a few in the last couple of years, notably The Price (4*) with David Suchet in the title role and All My Sons at The Old Vic, which was wonderful (5*). What I love about Miller’s plays is his deep understanding of what makes people tick. His characters are extraordinarily ordinary; they are real people with all their hopes and failings revealed with great compassion and insight into human behaviour. A Miller play that stands out from years ago, but seen twice, was Broken Glass, about a woman in US who is literally paralysed by hearing about Kristallnacht, and the play centres of her appointments with a psychoanalyst who helps her understand what’s going on.

Another great playwright is Terence Rattigan and I saw a brilliant production of his Deep Blue Sea at the National in 2016 (5*).

Noel Coward never fails to entertain and the production at The Old Vic of Present Laughter, starring Andrew Scott, last year (5*) was stunningly good and I don’t think I’d laughed so much in ages nor since. I tend to choose quite serious, meaty plays but laughter is good and important too.

Harold Pinter: When I was first working, a young editorial assistant at Methuen, back in the early 70s, we published Pinter and were taken on a work outing to see No Man’s Land, starring those theatre legends, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. I have to confess I struggled; I’d never seen anything like it before and I really didn’t understand it. I’m still wary of Pinter but some of his plays are more easily accessible and I saw a most glorious production of The Birthday Party, starring Stephen Mangan and Toby Jones, in 2018 (5*) and an excellent Betrayal (4*) last year.

Other fairly recent highlights are a revival of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Ferryman by Jez Butterworth, Lucy Kirwood’s Mosquitoes … and I haven’t even mentioned Alan Bennett (The History Boys, A Habit of Art, etc.), Eugene O’Neill (A Long Day’s Journey into Night), David Hare (The Racing Demon trilogy back in the 90s; Skylight when it first opened in 90s and a brilliant revival with Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan in 2015), Ibsen (a 5* Master Builder with Ralph Feinnes at The Old Vic in 2016), Patrick Marber (Closer) … but I must stop … I’ve never written so much here! But I can’t go without mentioning Tom Stoppard. Oh I do miss theatre outings at the moment, but my last was one of the best ever, Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, which I saw with my son in February this year. It was extraordinary; so powerful. Jonathan hadn’t seen a Stoppard before and was literally moved to tears at the end; he wanted to go back for a second viewing with his wife, and said it was a play that warranted being seen more than once, but the pandemic intervened. But it’s lovely for me that in this great yawning gap of no theatre, I remember such a wonderful evening, seeing the work of one of our greatest playwrights with my lovely son, just before everything closed down.

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Tim:

Oh Dear when were we last in a Theatre?

The test for favourites must be plays that have stuck in my mind. Before having a family my mother was an actress, tales of rep with Robert Morley and Stewart Grainger. I was taken to the theatre from a young age, west end matinees , queuing for cheap seats in the Gods and of course the Mousetrap. So, not in pecking order:

ARIEL DORFMAN: Death and the Maiden; chilling tale of a woman imprisoned under Pinochet who later meets her torturer. Subsequent film directed by Polanski with Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley.

HAROLD PINTER: The Caretaker, The Birthday Party, The Homecoming and so many more. How many playwrights have won a Nobel Prize?

TOM STOPPARD: So many, e.g. Travesties; Had tickets for Leopoldstadt in April ….oh dear

DAVID HARE: Plenty, later film with Meryl Streep a must for me .

Skylight 

Murmuring Judges 

The Red Barn 

CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON: Dramatization of Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

JASMIN REZA: Art – Brilliant play. Did not enjoy God of Carnage so much.

J.B. PRIESTLEY: An Inspector Calls – Written in the 30s but I saw it under the Thatcher regime; still very pertinent.

IBSEN:  Of course, e.g. The Master Builder, The Wild Duck.

CHEKHOV: The Seagull.

I wonder how many will have put “The Bard “ at the head of their lists. At the risk of being expelled from the group I, outrageously, admit to not particularly enjoying W.S. Unless one has studied /read carefully the play beforehand I believe a large percentage of an audience only understand 50% of the script but think they SHOULD be enjoying the play. Memorable exceptions,Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night; Jude Law’s Hamlet.

Most overrated, Michael Frayne’s Noises Off. Terrible!!!!

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Christine A:

Top of the list has to be Arthur Miller as I always come away from his plays with my habitual ways of thinking churned up and tossed around. A particularly memorable performance was Warren Mitchell (of Alf Garnett fame) as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman.  Likewise Ronald Harwood is another playwright who really makes me think.  I went into a performance of Taking Sides thinking that it was an open and shut case that Furtwangler should have left Germany as soon as the Nazis came to power, but after it was over I could see a valid argument for not leaving too. Two school productions of Shaw plays have made me a life-long fan and I’m pretty keen on Oscar Wilde too.

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Margaret:

I have always loved three particular greats of American drama, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. It seems to me that I am being presented with the dilemmas of ordinary mortals, the understated tragedies of life, especially those of the working stiff. In three great plays, “Long Day’s Journey into Night” (O’Neill), “A Streetcar Named Desire” (Williams) and “Death of a Salesman” (Miller) we recognise our own lives writ large on the stage: striving for success; failure; abandonment; love and its agonies, joys and comforts; and the heartbreak that children and parents can visit on each other. I have wondered why the American dream presented by these writers can seem so tough, poignant, hard to achieve, while on the British stage we are more often presented with eccentricity, individualism, “characters” like Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s “Look back in Anger” dealing with his own disaffection.

Perhaps the personal work ethic – making your own way – is more deeply embedded in the American psyche. I always remember reading an English writer who had worked in the US fashion business, who argued that in the US if you are poor or unsuccessful, it is your own fault, you have not tried hard enough. Here in Britain, in contrast, the writer suggested, although we need to acknowledge responsibility, we can, nonetheless, also blame circumstance, structural social factors – it is not always one’s own fault. For example, Arnold Wesker’s “kitchen sink” dramas, “Roots”, “The Kitchen Sink” and “Chicken Soup with Barley” were situated in known societal circumstances.

These opposing attitudes could tell us why Willy Loman in Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” is so bitterly sad and suicidal in later life – he believes he has failed, that he has truly lost his identity. The great quote from Linda Loman, Willy’s wife, at the end of “Death of a Salesman” goes to the heart of the tragedy. “So, attention must be paid. He is not to be allowed fall into his grave like an old dog.” She demands acknowledgement of the tragedy and suffering of an ordinary man. Thus Miller’s play reaches the height of Greek tragedy. We experience catharsis.

I can’t resist quickly visiting Shakespeare here. My experience of the bard has, as with so many of us, been varied. But without doubt a particular performance of “Macbeth” is the one I treasure most highly. In the 90s the “Duke’s Head” in Richmond took it upon itself to build a tiny theatre upstairs above the bar. Seating for about 30 people was basic, and the stage was small. However, we locals loved it. Actors like to keep in practice, and will seize every opportunity, if not actually working, to hone their skills. So we not only encountered new playwrights at the Duke’s Head but seasoned performers too. We saw several new John Godber works there and were always thrilled to recognise stars from theatre or television on the tiny stage. Quality was assured. When “Macbeth” was announced, we took along a friend who had never seen it. The staging was a miracle of ingenuity, from the ghost (super lighting and candles) to the woods of Dunsinane (lots of scratchy shrubs). The acting was terrific. We had to sit on the front row – our feet were tucked under our seats so as to avoid impeding the action. But we were carried along by the verve of the cast. At the interval, our friend Anna, turned to me, pink with excitement “What happens next?” she begged. Astonishment all round – she had no idea of the plot of Macbeth – she really did not know what would happen. It reminded me of the first time we took our five-year-old to the panto in Glasgow (“Is it real?” she gasped at the interval.) The play drove on to its bloody conclusion – we were all thoroughly satisfied and emotionally exhausted. As we filed out, we found that all of our shoes were blobbed with tomato sauce from the fight scenes so near the front row. Wonderful. All this for £5 life membership.

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I’m sure we’re all going to go on thinking of playwrights we missed out when writing our contributions … I do! But if you’re reading this, please do share your favourite playwright and theatre memories with us in Comments below.

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The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

Published in 1990, this collection of linked stories by American writer Tim O’Brien is about a platoon of American soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War and are based on his own experience as a soldier, with some of the characters being semi-autobiographical. It was written in response to him feeling that so few people ‘back home’ really understood what was going on in Vietnam. Here’s our group’s response to the stories:

Ted:

This is a collection of interrelated stories inspired by experiences the author had as a serving infantryman in the Vietnam War. The title, The Things They Carried refers to both the mundane and the deadly equipment that soldiers carried into battle. But it is also about personal keepsakes, emotions, memories and particularly the fear of showing cowardice that they all carried. The atmosphere of the jungle war and the terrifying dangers are well captured. There is also often no sense of mission or strategy in what they did; ‘searching villages without knowing what to look for, not caring — frisking children and old men. Blowing tunnels. Sometimes setting fires and sometimes not’. Some of the stories demonstrate the senseless brutality of stressed young soldiers unable to articulate their emotions in any other way. I loathed the descriptions of animal cruelty like the blowing up of a puppy with an antipersonnel mine, and the slow torture of a baby VC water buffalo.

Descriptions of four particularly traumatic episodes are repeated across several of the stories, each time the incident is viewed from a slightly different perspective. I think these are to demonstrate the randomness of death in war and also the horror of taking life itself. They are also raised to quantify the qualities of courage and cowardice in combat. In Speaking of Courage, ex-soldier Norman Bowker repetitively drives a seven-mile loop around a lake in his home town whilst musing over the medals he had won and thinking back to an act where he felt he had not been brave enough to save the life of a friend. [Three years later he hanged himself.]

This is a more reflective book than others I have read about the Vietnam War and is essentially anti-war.

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Christine A:

Given a free choice war stories would not be my chosen genre but I persisted for two reasons; one it was the book group choice and two, a book blogger I respect (Lady Fancifull https://bit.ly/3jlxo2b) had written a very positive review: “there is absolutely no sentimentality within these pages, but there is beauty in the unflinching facing of horror”. The unflinching facing of horror being the reader’s – the soldiers flinch many times and well they might.

This is an anti-war book that shows how war is but doesn’t lecture the reader on what stance they should take about it, and although it is very violent it is not an unremitting gorefest.

There is no linear progression which at first is quite confusing – the initial chapter* seems like an endless list of the physical things which get taken to war but as the book proceeds we understand that the effects of having fought are carried for evermore. Some deal with it by writing about it – “By telling stories you objectify your experience. You separate it from yourself” (Page 170). In the saddest cases it can’t be dealt with and the veteran takes their own life. O’Brien’s skilful writing shows us the inevitability of this.

For me one of the most affecting chapters is On the Rainy River, which is about the effect of receiving a draft letter. I had not realised before that fleeing to Canada to avoid the Draft, not only meant exile for the draftee but disgrace at home for their family. This is a delicately drawn chapter, which raised so many issues not confined to Vietnam but applies to all wars with conscientious objectors and healthy young men unwilling (understandably) to put their lives at risk for specious reasons. O’Brien made me understand the emotional effect of receiving draft papers, what it means to contemplate “active service” (hideous euphemism). Later in the book we are shown that young Vietnamese are under the same societal pressures – “Beyond anything else, he was afraid of disgracing himself, and therefore his family and village” (Page 133) – the Vietnamese perspective has echoes of the American one – the honour of the family is so important the individual must sacrifice himself for it.

It’s not possible to tell how much of the book actually happened but in the chapter entitled Good Form, O’Brien makes the case that it doesn’t matter. “I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth”. He tells us in a roundabout way how a fictional account will have the greater emotional impact on the reader. It’s impossible to sort out fact from fiction but according to O’Brien it’s not necessary to do so, and that’s good enough for me.

*from Kay’s email this morning I realise that this book is short stories!

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Christine B:

I haven’t read any other book about the Vietnam War in which, thanks to Harold Wilson, we were not involved. The Australians were and it figures largely in their memories, another lot of fatalities. I have a relative who is half American and enlisted; after he was demobbed he came to England to stay with his divorced mother in Rutland for quite a while, pretty withdrawn, and then went back to south east Asia, chose to live on a boat in Laos with a fisherman and his family for two years and ‘It cleared my head’ he said.

Tim O’Brien needed a break clearing his head before he started to write; I hope he has.
I thought the first piece, the title being the same as the book, wonderfully descriptive and with well-drawn characters. The amount of stuff they had to carry was incredible and had to be in jungle warfare.

Others that I liked, the short pieces Stockings, which featured Henry Dobbins who was my favourite character, superstitious, wearing his girlfriend’s pantyhose round his neck but found a reason not to worry about it when the situation changed. Talking about the monks when they used a temple as their camp, Henry said ‘Treat Them  Decent.’ Other short ones I liked were Church and Style.

An interesting and unusual book; there will be times when I shall reread one or two of the pieces.

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Louise:

I listened to The Things They Carried as an Audible book, accompanying me on walks (finishing, with the exception of the last piece read by the author himself, last night).

It was a good medium. And read by Bryan Cranston (of Breaking Bad TV series fame) it was extremely powerful. I often get put off Audible books because of the narrator but Cranston is excellent. So much so that when I got to the final piece and heard Tim O’Brien’s own voice – much higher and less well modulated – I had to switch off.

It is unclear how much in the stories – which clearly draw on O’Brien’s own harrowing experiences soldiering in Vietnam – are fact and how much fiction. The author continually refers to himself as being 43 years old now and a writer, and he spends moments in the book reflecting on the power of story narration to transmit a real experience while not actually relating real events. Often these moments of reflection come as an introduction or postscript to a story. He seems concerned to be completely believable and yet not betray real events and characters at the same time. He is writing about the impressions left in his memories of the time.

I say it was a good medium because I don’t think I could have read this…. Cranston kept me going. My own head voice would probably have shut me down, transported into the jungles and horror of Vietnam during the long war. Like so many at the time (O’ Brien reflects on this in relation to ‘girls at home’ at one point) I could not know or understand the war, male relationships, the humour, the drug-induced support of the times and even the occasional beauty – and growing up in that era, I certainly did not have it drawn to my attention. I knew Vietnam was happening. I thought it was remote and not related to my life. I certainly never understood why the Americans were so frightened of communism.

So I am grateful to O’Brien and Cranston for giving me some real insights to this utterly foreign experience. It is a hard read and the ‘facts’ are hard to face – but less so now when I have watched many films and programmes dealing with the topic of war on the ground and specifically Vietnam and Cambodia. Nevertheless films and TV series are displacements.  This book was real, horrifyingly real. And as always, one is left with the question of whether war and fighting is EVER worth the cost?

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Many thanks to our reviewers! If you’ve read this short story collection or want to comment on our reviews, please leave a message in Comments below.

 

 

Planning: September – December 2020

We held our regular 3-monthly planning meeting this evening on Zoom. It worked very well and it was great to see people – albeit in boxes on a screen and not over a glass of wine in The Roebuck! There were lots of suggestions and this is what we came up with:

September 2020

1st (Novel) – American Rust by Philipp Meyer (Ted)

8th (Poetry) – Favourite summer poem (Margaret)

15th (Short Stories) – The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri (Christine A)

22nd (Theme) – Books you felt you should read/were highly recommended, but didn’t ‘click’.

29th – usually a 5th Tuesday meal but to be decided later.

October 2020

6th (Novel) – The Fear Index by Robert Harris (Doreen)

13th (Poetry) – Christina Rossetti (Christine B)

20th (Short Stories) – The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald (Christine B)

27th (Theme) – Africa (Ted)

November 2020

3rd (Novel) – Clock Dance by Anne Tyler (Margaret)

10th (Poetry) – Dick Davis (Christine A)

17th (Short Stories/Novella) – A Very Private Life by Michael Frayn

24th – Planning Meeting!

December 2020

1st (Novel) – The Narrow Land by Christine Dwyer Hickey (Kay)

8th (Poetry) – Robert Frost (Louise)

15th (Short Stories) – Every Move You Make by David Malouf (Louise)

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Happy reading!

 

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

Our choice for ‘Novel’ this month is Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees. First published in 2002, the book became an instant bestseller and was long-listed for The Orange Prize. It was made into a film in 2008.

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Margaret: 

I confess that I embarked on this book with my usual prejudice against quirky titles. No excuse, I know, but it was reinforced by the cover, gold lettering, lots of little pics, and words like “phenomenal”, “bestseller” and so on. However, at least it had an enthusiastic endorsement from Anita Shreve, that quirky, phenomenal US bestseller herself. But it did seem to scream “Woman’s book”.

Nonetheless, I did greatly relish the device, consistent throughout this coming-of-age tale, of framing everything against a background of the ways in which bees conduct their communal lives, contrasting roles, gender duties, sacrifice, and dealing with death with those of their human counterparts – bees have an answer to everything!  It demonstrates exactly the sort of enterprising first-novel ingenuity that publishers love. And it also lends sparkle to this Southern Carolina tale of 14-year old Lily, a white girl, escaping from her bitter, harsh, widowed father along with her only friend Rosaleen, a black servant. Lily has rescued Rosaleen from prison where she has been flung for “attacking” (spitting at) a white man. We are straight into 60s America, racial prejudice, Johnson’s 1964 Civil Rights Act, and social turmoil. Rosaleen had really been on her way to register to vote for the first time, and, rather poignantly, Lily’s first-person narrative tells us that to this end, Rosaleen had been painstakingly practising her handwriting.

It has to be acknowledged that this is a great, much-loved story. It has everything: dark family secrets; murder; corrosive guilt; teenage angst; exciting events; new friends, who can be trusted and learned from; an unexpected and valued mentor; sexual stirrings; and, most superbly well done, the ultimate in a household God (this alone was a wonderful melange of Christianity and something rather more primitive). There is also a lot of humour.

Two crucial aspects of the book are the setting – the South Carolina woods, hills, waterways, beautifully realised, and the great overriding metaphor of honey itself, always presented as a real, healing presence, for good, for comfort, for reinforcement of faith, for love.

The third aspect, is that of the range of characters – the sisters who run the bee-keeping farm especially; the flawed father who comes to acceptance of his daughter’s freedom from him reluctantly; a colourful cast of irresistible local ladies decked in all the over-the-top panoply of the South; and the hero, waiting, as promised, in the wings.

In the end, it seems to me that this is, essentially, a young person’s book, particularly, a young girl’s book. The moral lessons which inform Lily’s personal story, her journey to emotional maturity and forgiveness, and her eventual acceptance of reality without bitterness are the compelling forces that drive a narrative that would draw in any younger reader. At the same time, the events of the sixties must also add resonance for a younger reader.

But, for the older reader, like myself, coming to this book for the first time, I am not so sure. Is Lily’s world so minutely observed that her private confidences, and hectic secrets begin to pall? Similarly, might characters with cute names tied to birthdate – August, April, June, May, for example – seem over sweet? And is the part played by coincidence too stretched? Maybe this is light fare for those whose forays into southern Gothic may well have already encompassed heavier hitters like Steinbeck, Falkner, Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, James Baldwin and others.

(Of course, none of these thoughts need have troubled me or you, in fact, if I had just thought to lift the phone to my own 14-year-old US grand-daughter – an avid reader – and asked her for her opinion.)

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Ted:

This is a novel about a young girl’s rite of passage to independence set in South Carolina during the civil rights era of the mid sixties. The main protagonist is a 14-year-old white girl called Lily Owens who lives on a peach farm with her cruel, widowed father named T. Ray. Her mother died in a gun accident 10 years earlier that may have involved Lily herself.

Her only real friend is the black help Rosaleen who had worked for them since her mother’s death. When Rosaleen is beaten up in jail by racists and then put under guard in hospital, Lily decides to leave home and spring her free. They escape to Tiburton, a town whose name was written on a picture of a Black Madonna in her late mother’s possessions. They notice this same picture on honey jars in a shop which helped them to find a pink house with three eccentric black sisters who take them in and introduce them their world of beekeeping, honey and an ancient wooden boat figurehead called Black Mary. Lily discovers that her mother had sought refuge with these sisters years earlier when she had left T. Ray. The eldest sister, August Boatwright is a supportive, maternal figure who helps Lily to gain insight about herself and her late mother. Lily and Rosaleen finally become permanent members of the Boatwright family.

I found the early part of the novel with the escape from home and hospital exciting. I enjoyed discovering the different sisters’ characters and those of all their friends. The ceremonies around Black Mary with references to slavery were a bit baffling and the coincidence linking her mother to the house was a bit far fetched but I went along for the ride and generally found it an appealing novel.

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Christine B:

First published in 2002, her first novel. The story is set in 1964, the year Lyndon Baines Johnson gave black Americans the right to vote

I found this book fresh, unusual, imaginative and very brave to tackle the political problems, particularly having placed it in South Carolina.

The story is about a fourteen-year-old girl, Lily, whose mother died in mysterious circumstances. She lives in an isolated farm with her cruel, unloving father who tells her that she had shot her mother accidentally at the age of four and the only other person in the house is a black housekeeper/nanny named Rosaleen, who could be called her only friend.
The story begins with Rosaleen telling Lily that she was going to register to Vote. Lily goes with her and they get into a fracas with some aggressive white men and Rosaleen was arrested. Lily had found a box of her mother’s treasures. which included a picture of a black Madonna and on the back was written Tiburon, a small town in South Carolina. After an argument with her father – T. Ray as she calls him – she decides to go to Tiburon and solve the mystery of her mother. She leaves home, goes to the gaol and manages to get Rosaleen out of gaol.
They arrive in Tiburon and in the market Lily sees on honey jars  the same picture as hers. She asks the stall holder where the honey has come from, they get there and meet three black sisters, the Boatwrights, who are commercial beekeepers. The story develops with sensitive treatments of the relationships and problems between black and white people and everybody else. Lily’s unusual attitude of easily accepting the black women she is meeting is basically because they are kind.
One could criticise the unlikely situations of the easy relationship between the black sisters and the lawyer, who is encouraging a young black man to study law and wouldn’t the sisters consider the risk of being accused of kidnapping a white girl, but the story weaves entertaining tales, amusing and interesting characters, falling in love with Lily learning about people’s emotions and needs.
The details of beekeeping are very interesting and informative and I loved the quotations at the beginning of each chapter.
I think teenagers and young adults particularly, could learn from the book, wherever they live.

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Christine A:

I found The Secret Life of Bees a hard read because I never really connected with it but in these strange times a book that is ultimately about hope and optimism can’t be a bad thing so I’m glad I persisted.

The protagonist Lily, a quirky 14-year-old girl with a habit of telling tall stories to get her out of tricky situations, is on the run with Rosaleen, her nanny. They are both admirable figures and you can’t help rooting for them. But I found it hard to believe that the three black sisters who give them shelter would have run the risk of taking in the strays – one black, one white – in the violent racially-segregated US Deep South of the 1960s. One important fact I did learn about this period is just how difficult it was for the black electorate to actually register to vote, even after the Civil Rights Act was passed.

The book is well written and the characterisation good – the three sisters never blur into one as they have been very distinctively drawn. My underlying reservation about the plausibility of the plot is what held me back from enjoying it wholeheartedly, but if feel-good reading is what’s needed then The Secret Life of Bees is definitely worth considering.

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Louise: 

I can’t think of a more appropriate book to be reading, as I was, during the BLM weeks. It was prescient of the book group to choose this as the book of the month.

For it was a complete celebration of the warmth of a black family (albeit one with heaviness in its past) as they pull in and embrace the 14-year-old white girl who has run from her abusive father with her nanny/housekeeper Rosaleen, rescuing her from jail in the process.

The book explores so many themes, not just of racism (although it is present) and abuse, but also of healing, forgiveness, lies that reveal themselves gradually, unreliable memories and all the while with bees in the background, the means through which Lily recovers from her cloud-covered past, finds redemption and becomes a whole person.

I started out (as so often) a bit resistant to the narrative and the characters. Lily was feisty but appalling, Rosaleen seemed indifferent to the risks Lily was taking on her behalf. But as the chapters came and went I got sucked in. The sadness that tinged the impossible love Lily develops for Zach (would there be an after-story), the tragedy of May, and the revelations to about her mother, and the long night of crying and healing with August and the hum of the bees forming a perfect background throughout.

A story that could be real, full of beauty and characters that sit with you a long while – the best I have encountered in a long while. I note there is a film (to come?), which I am sure will be good, but very glad I was introduced to the book first

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If you’ve read The Secret Life of Bees do please let us know what you thought of it in Comments below.