The Bee-Loud Glade by Steve Himmer (A Review by Helen McClory)

Atticus Books

224 pages/$9.99

Sitting in a cafe full of bustle, greasily-lit against the mist outside and pungent with the unsettling reek of poorly-brewed grounds dumped into an open bin, I open this book at its beginning, and suddenly I am utterly elsewhere:

Last night’s storm rolled through like it meant something, crackling and snarling and snapping down branches, howling outside the mouth of my cave like the coyotes I sometimes hear far away in these hills (they’ve never come close, and I’ve never known why). It was the loudest storm I’ve heard in the years I’ve lived here, or maybe it was only the first big one to pass since my eyes began failing me and forced me to listen more deeply than I did before.

I have been dropped down once again into a calm, pastoral space. The Bee-Loud Glade is the story of Finch, a corporate blogger miserable in his aimless life until he is made a strange offer, and shruggingly accepts it: to become the ornamental hermit of an eccentric industrialist named Crane, and to take up his post in the cave mentioned above. It’s a story of nature in artifice, of the comforts of isolation, money without the power to compel. Reading, I think of Robinson Crusoe, if he had been far less the little conqueror of his island, far more meek and accepting and meditative. And employed, I suppose. A self imposed position, so a little of Thoreau too, without the prickly side.

Finch, sent to live in a constructed cave in a ‘wild’ part of Mr Crane’s garden, idles with a purposefulness, occasionally carrying out allotted tasks such as playing badly on a rustic flute, or dabbing about with paints, or his favourite inactivity, floating in the artificial river Crane puts in for his viewing pleasure. There is an interiority to the novel – partly down to Finch’s muteness, required for the duration of his service – that gives it a wonderfully restful quality. The novel, while calming, is never dull. It is the story of a self-realisation, a critique of the blinding swiftness of modern life. The pulse slows. Birdsong. The brambles on the hill tangle and their fruits ripen. All the time, Finch is there, recording or looking back on his life with the help of his inner ‘scribe’. The passivity which made Finch’s life difficult in the world of offices and advertising perfectly suits him to his constrained life as a hermit:

I had the river, or the river had me; there was quiet and calm and there was the cave. There was the house on the hill and the appearance of food in the niche of my wall twice a day, and most of all there was time. Time enough, at last, for nothing at all. Time to think. And then the house and the meals and the Cranes were all gone, but I still had all that time. Maybe more of it.

This deliberate, meditative way in which Finch goes about the world provides a break from other novels I’d been reading, in which the male character rushed about, usually being brusque, anxious or cruel, or in other ways performing an over-familiar masculinity. Sometimes you need a book in which the protagonist is just a good sort. Distinct, and of a type rare to be found in the Western world, a prophetic sort with no need to prophesise or convert. Someone who comes to their own conclusions in the fullness of time, and does not seek to inflict these conclusions on others. You know that Finch would never sneer. Never try to break another human being. He sits on a ledge above his cave, watching the sunrise, performing a duty of silent witness of the beauty of things I might otherwise have missed. That I do miss, in my life in this currently rain-lashed, misty city.

Again I must point out, that despite the meditative quality, The Bee-Loud Glade progresses and gently compels. The threads of the plot are smooth as little streams of water. We are drawn onwards by the changes in circumstances, the various invasions of this garden paradise. It is a book to be read in a hammock. To pretend to read while in a hammock. You pause to take a drink from your chilled strawberry lemonade, thinking about the philosophical point Finch has come to, the dilemma or revelation he faces. A bit of air comes off the river and cools your face. You carry on turning the pages, moving the book as the shade moves.