The Music of Bees

A limited third-person narrator tells the story from the point of view of the three main characters: Jake Stevenson, Alice Holtzman, and Harry Stokes. This means that the narrator has insight into their thoughts and feelings but not those of the other characters, whom the novel presents as seen only from the main characters’ points of view. In Chapter 5, which is a scene involving both Jake and Alice, Alice’s point of view takes precedence. The opening chapters introduce the main characters. Although they could hardly be more different from one another, they do have one thing in common: They all face mental health issues. Jake has depression related to the accident that paralyzed him. His life has changed dramatically and has become narrower in scope. He has the thought that “nothing else [is] going to happen in his miserable life” (12). He must find a way to deal with his disability and move forward again. Alice is a widow who has experienced anxiety and panic attacks ever since her husband, Buddy, died unexpectedly. She hasn’t recovered from his sudden loss the previous spring. Her grief in connection with her memories of him is a recurring motif in the novel, and she struggles to prevent it from interfering with her daily life. Alice is a loner and doesn’t allow herself to get close to others. Living in a world that has other people in it is therefore another challenge she faces. The third character, Harry, likewise has difficulty dealing with people. He lacks self-confidence and becomes very anxious in social interactions. In Chapter 3, this condition has almost comical proportions. When he sees an ambulance arrive at his uncle’s trailer, he’s so panic stricken at having to deal with the situation that he literally runs away, although he doesn’t know why he reacts like that: “He [can]not put this childlike panic into words befitting adult behavior” (35). How the three main characters change to overcome their emotional difficulties forms the basis for one of the novel’s three primary themes: Restoring Mental Health and Creating Community.

The lives of these three characters intersect by circumstance as the story unfolds, and they develop a deep bond with one another. The emotional tribulations of the three protagonists are set against the beauty of the novel’s setting in Hood County, Oregon, during early spring. In Chapter 1, Jake reveals how he has always appreciated that time of year:

This season—when unexpected rain showers swept across the valley floor and the wind turned the orchards into waves of blossoms—had always filled him with hope. The chorus frogs sang in the irrigation ditches. […] Hawks perched along the fence line of county roads, and tiny finches darted through the air (10).

Alice, who has spent her whole life in the area, loves it deeply. As she drives home with her new bee purchase, she observes,

Basalt cliffs overlapped each other in a view that unfolded mile after mile along the Columbia River. She knew the distinct monoliths by heart—Rooster Rock, Wind Mountain, Beacon Rock. In the early sunset, the green hills and rocky crags were cast in a pink veil. It looked like a painting, a dream. Alice never grew tired of looking at it (19).

Passages like these firmly ground the novel in a particular place, and similar descriptions of the natural environment of Hood River County and surrounding areas occur in later chapters.

Two more notable elements emerge in these five opening chapters. In Chapter 2, the narrator explains that Alice’s parents sold their orchard eight years ago because the large producers had imposed spray laws on Hood County that the smaller orchards didn’t want. Alice’s father, Al, believed that the new regulations were too severe and would have adverse consequences. This brief description of an earlier episode foreshadows the much larger event to come, when the pesticide company SupraGro, with the county’s acquiescence, introduces a highly toxic product that some local orchardists are ready to accept until environmental groups stage a demonstration against it. These elements introduce another of the novel’s main themes: Environmental Activism and Personal Responsibility.

In addition, these chapters introduce some comparisons and contrasts between the bees and humans. The bees have a community in which every bee does its allotted duty for the good of the whole. This is contrasted, at this early stage of the story, with Alice’s solitary existence in which she just fends for herself and Jake’s dysfunctional family, ruined by his emotionally abusive father, Ed, who seems to dislike his son intensely and takes every opportunity to shame and humiliate him. As the story progresses, Alice will come to resemble the queen bee, which is the “leader and mother of them all” in the nascent little human community that develops on her farm (58). She will accumulate around her two worker bees, Jake and Harry, each of whom will contribute in his own way to the success of her beekeeping hobby and business. At the end of Chapter 5, however, Alice compares herself to a bee in a rather different way as she drives home; she imagines herself flying “toward home like an errant worker bee trying to find her way to the safety of the hive” (62). Thus, a third primary theme begins to form: Beauty and the Bees.