Grey Bees and Snails: Two Novels about Ukraine

 

In Survival, Margaret Atwood's fascinating essay about Canada and its literature, she analyzed the relation between animals in a nation's fiction  and its views about itself.  The United States' animal stories were all about overcoming them, she pointed out, while English ones had cozy human-like beasts who ended up taking tea  together.  In Canadian writing, on the other hand, the animals were always victims which, she  argued, reflected Canadians' basic attitudes toward life.

Interesting idea, I remember thinking, but put it away, until recently when I've read two extremely good novels by Ukrainian writers, Grey Bees (2018) by Andrey Kurkov (translated into English by Boris Dralyuk) and Endling by Maria Reva (2025). Kurkov's hero is a beekeeper who wants little more than to allow his bees to do what they do best--collect pollen and make honey.  But he lives in territory that Russia invaded in 2014, and undertakes a long journey to safer, more clement country. It's  a quest and he encounters many adventures.  He and bees survive, which is saying something.

Reva is a Ukrainian-Canadian who immigrated with her family when she was a child.  Her novel starts off as a near-farce: three young women enroll themselves in a "beautiful Ukrainian bride" scheme, largely to make some money.  One of them also is a biologist bent on saving snails from extinction, and she's outfitted a van as a lab.  The other two are hoping to make contact with their militantly feminist mother who has disappeared, perhaps to avoid the consequences of her previous wild protests.  But they, and Reva, come up against the 2022 Russian incursion into Ukraine. The story first skitters to a false end, and then takes off in another direction involving kidnapping 13 would-be husbands for Ukrainian brides and snail match-making.  Quite funny, and very relevant.

All this to say: if you apply Atwood's scheme for comparing a people with its literature, particularly its animal stories, Ukraine comes across as a small being that survives great odds.  Makes sense, doesn't it?

Grey Bees won a slew of prizes when it came out, and--this just in!--Endling has won the 2026 Amazon.ca First Novel award.  Well deserved.    

Hope--and a Good Story--on the Other Side of the Great Derangement

 

  

The pre-historic village of  Bouldnor Cliff off the Isle of Wight is now completely submerged

Ian McEwan's What Can We Know was published just as I was putting the finishing touches on my Before We Forget: How Remembering Will Get Us Through the Next 75 Years. I borrowed McEwan's book from the library without really know what it was about: his novels are always good reads, and that was just what I needed at a time when I was struggling to get my own story told

 

It was a delight to jump into McEwan's story which rolled along briskly.  A young scholar 100 years from now is trying to resurrect a poem written in honour of a poet's wife in 2014. Doing so requires a fair amount of legwork on his part as well as ferry rides around the British Isles which now are even more  of an archipelago, due to rising sea levels.  The picture he paints of what is in effect our current reality is somewhat off, as are his imaginings of both the poem and the people in the poet's literary circle.  We learn the truth of the latter in the second part of the book (spoiler alert.) but it's a mystery solved satisfactorily.  We are similarly assured that the scholar and his equally-scholarly girl friend are likely to live sort-of happily ever after.

 

But the thing I liked most about the book is its underlying premise: life will go on even after "the great derangement" brought on by climate change and international conflict.  Obviously, surviving all this has not been easy and life is far from as pleasant as it is now for a lot of us.  But we--a general, all-encompassing we--will survive. Furthermore people will want to remember what happened in the past and  will have the tools to investigate it. McEwan postulates a Nigeria that has become the global power house and which has been able to salvage all our electronic records: a conceit that seems a little far-fetched now, but who knows?

 

What I do know is that my message in Before We Forget is exactly that: memory, collective and individual is what we will need to continue as civilizations.  Hopeful thoughts as the seas rise faster than ever, and stupid, destructive war rages on and on. 

Barometer Rising: a Book about the First World War That Has Echoes Today

 

Barometer Rising was Canadian writer Hugh MacLennan's first published novel. It juxtaposes a rather conventional love story--Penny thinks Neil was killed in the Great War, Neil wasn't but is hiding because he's been wrongly accused of cowardice, they spend most of the novel yearning for each other--with the all-too-real explosion of a ship carrying munitions in Halifax harbour in 1917.

A new Penguin edition of the book has a photo taken in the minutes following the collision of the French cargo ship SS Mont-Blanc with the Norwegian vessel SS Imo. The Mont-Blanc caught fire and its highly flamable payload exploded, creating the largest human-made blast until the A-bombs of World War II. But this does not occur until half way through the book, leaving one participant in a book discussion I recently led to express frustration at the slowness of the book's start.

MacLennan surely did this on purpose, because his aim was to write a story about Canada, its contribution to a war thousands of miles away, and its struggle to become a nation that is neither English nor American but something unique. As such, the characters' reflections are particularly pertinent today, when the country is trying to navigate its way through waters riled by Donald J. Trump. Prime Minister Mark Carney's several recent speeches about the importance of second-tier power working together can be read as direct descendants of the Canada MacLennan was writing about--a big country with much to give to the world. (Photo by Victor Magnus)