... If not the mother, then necessity is probably the rather wrinkled & stingy maiden aunt of the Bad Beekeeper's sense of invention. [120]
[a] bee has five eyes. And thanks to what’s called ‘flicker fusion potential’, it can see at the equivalent of three hundred frames a second. If bees went to the cinema, the film would appear to them as a long sequence of still pictures. In other words they could see your hand moving like it’s a slow-motion action replay. [8]
&
CIVILISATION — What's the smoker for? [...]
Smoke makes the bees think that there’s a fire nearby and they may have to evacuate the hive. They quickly eat some of the honey to prepare for the journey. When the smoke passes, they realise they won’t have to leave after all. By this time though, they’ve had so much to eat that their mood has improved and so they are more placid.
& Waggle Dance —
First of all they match up and down a bit to indicate the position of the Sun. Then they veer off at an angle to indicate the compass bearing of the flowers they are guiding other bees too. They also shake their bodies at a certain frequency to let the others know just how far they have to go. And here’s the really interesting bit: the other bees can’t see them doing it. They feel the dance through their antennae. It’s outstanding when you think about it. [29]
but lastly, mostly:
FELLOWSHIP — Ultimately, though, it’s all about the union with the bees. Forget about the honey, and the candle making, and the mead and all the other little bits and pieces you can harvest from the hive, like pollen and propolis. The real joy for me is just in keeping the bees, literally. From the moment you lift off the lid on the hive and peer inside, you are entering another world, and leaving your own. [243]
: A borrowed read from some friends I happened to trade books with this summer. I'm not by any measure a straight-up consumer of SFF but there are certain ones which neatly intersect the genre whilst providing something extra elsewhere in keeping with my literary tastes. This particular read does just that, not least from its world inhabited by familiar characters from fiction.
Parry's Acknowledgments calls out a number of names, all bar one I'd knew of, had studied &/or read something by...
... thanks to Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, Margaret Mahy, Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis, Emily Brontë, and the other authors whose creations grace the pages of this book. You’re wonderful. Your words are wonderful. I’m sorry for what I did to them.
But it's also more than that. There's a real warmth & a care in how Parry's characters are cultivated & developed from their fictional origins; a love of reading; a world very much shaped by literary analysis (or for me, Lit Crit). Having five different Darcys (one sure nod to CF / BBC included) tickled me no end. And whilst I've never cared much for Dickens, I'm familiar enough with the ins & outs of his works to recognise & understand Copperfield, Uriah, Artful, Satis House, Havisham, Fagin & so on... If anything, the large equivalent dosage of Conan Doyle certainly helped — shout-out here for Henry (Hound Mk. 2), the depiction of Holmes as a righter of wrongs & a lovely bit of plot leading via 'the fly in the ointment' directly to:
“Moriarty,” Charlie said. “The Napoleon of crime.” The woman who wasn't Beth smiled. “Yes. And may I say, Dr. Sutherland, but it is a dangerous habit to finger books in the pockets of one’s dressing gown.” [364]
Well played indeed.
I'm not sure I always knew exactly where the storyline was headed. Sometimes there felt to be a lot of signposting around The Coming Of The New World without much development. But there was enough to run with or to keep track of & Parry was meanwhile plugging the gaps of past, present & future. Diary entries neatly breaking up the novel. Helping me thus in turn, as a reader, to better understand how Robert and Charles had been shaped as well as their fraternal relations.
It was the latter part of the book, with the new world's arrival, the showdown which became the most compelling. A particularly TTTW moment such as when the Henrys crossover in time. Yup --
If you have difficulty believing your brother isn’t real, try seeing him dead or dying in two vastly different forms, as two vastly different people, while he’s standing behind you both times as the person you grew up with. And then try to tell yourself it isn’t killing you inside. [390]
Beautiful, beautiful writing & (2) I don't tend to envisage or picture much when I'm reading but this I could see as it took me right back to MIF '19's Atmospheric Memory...
He was David Copperfield, and Sherlock Holmes, and Charles Dickens. He was Dr. Charles Sutherland, author of the world that was crumbling around us. He was words, and thought, and memory. He was a creature of metaphor and simile, of hopes and autobiography and dead people. And he was my brother. [426]
… Buildings folded over like the pages of a book. Liminal space. The space between two worlds. Where the light was strongest, there were no buildings—at least, none of bricks and mortar. They shone through with words. The city at the edges dissolved into block text, and the ground under my feet were shifting with printed sentences. In places the buildings looked like thinly painted watercolor over newsprint. In others there were holes torn through the walls or across the sky itself, and words teemed from those holes—or out of them, I couldn’t tell. Everything was in motion. And noise. There was so much noise. [425]
… I saw the city, Charley’s London, solid and real, made of words and thoughts and ideas and interpretation, sprawling out as far as I could see. It was disappearing: not to nothing, as Moriarty had feared, but into something I couldn’t begin to understand. It was passing into pure language. In another moment, perhaps, I would disappear with it. [427]
— The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry | John Mark Comer (underway)
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