Book Review: The Murmur of Bees

The Murmur of Bees by Sofía Segovia


This family-epic magical-realism novel set in Mexico around the turn of the century has all of the ingredients of a truly magnificent novel, but I found it tedious and a pain to finish. For me the thing that will stick with me the longest is the anguish of wanting to like it and the conundrum of why it wasn’t working. I listened to the audiobook, so my spellings of the names will all be guesses.

I think the main character is Simonopio, a foundling boy with a cleft palete who is constantly accompanied by bees wherever he goes. He’s adopted by Francisco and Beatriz Morales, a wealthy landowning couple who essentially function as the feudal lord and lady in the feudalistic structure of northeastern Mexican society during that time. Franciso and Beatriz are also major characters, as is their son Francisco Junior, who serves as a sort-of omniscient narrator for many of the events. Simonopio is the magical nature spirit character in the novel. He tends to understand things that others don’t, and know the future, which he’s unable or unwilling to communicate to others. In my opinion, the difference between magical realism and fantasy is that in fantasy, the magic has to make sense and be logically applied, whereas in magical realism, the supernatural elements exist only to serve the story’s theme or mood. As a fantasy writer, Simonopio bugged me. Why did he know so much and yet be clueless as to who killed Lupita? I also didn’t like Simonopio because he was this holy foundling, a sacred spirit who was wise beyond his years, and yet he uses this holy power only to benefit the Cortez-Morales family.

The reason this bothered me is that the Cortez-Morales family are held up as paragons, a truly noble family. They do seem to adhere rigidly to the expectations of their class and gender. Beatriz fights against the desire for vengeance as unwomanly, and Francisco does everything in his power, whether legal or not, to keep his land and power. In one scene, Francisco throws a fit because his daughter gets letters from a boy, and he’s aghast that people will talk about it. I know that this is completely appropriate for a man of his time and place, but it made me dislike him.

I think I was predisposed to favor Espiricueta. Espiricueta is the underdog. He wants what’s best for his family, and he strives, but all he gets is starvation and degradation. The Morales family don’t understand, because he is the coyote and they are the lions. The lions are noble, and the coyotes are villians, in the original sense of the word; landowners versus villagers. And yet, in real life, lions will devour their children and laze about while the lionesses do work, while coyotes are faithful and attentive to their kin. So when Espiricueta does beastly things, it didn’t make me shift my alliance so much as lose a protagonist. It made me like Espiricueta less when he proved to be a monster, but it didn’t make me like the Morales family more.

I guess I should have liked Beatriz, except that she didn’t seem to have any life beyond serving her family. Because of my own history, that narrative was too close to the conservative one that implies that a woman should strive to deny her need for a role other than servant to her family, and if that is unfulfilling, it just proves she is flawed. Look how happy she is, the narrative goes, for not having any wants other than self-abnegation. Even her hobby is one of serving the needs of others. By conservative standards, she’s a flawless paragon of womanhood. I wondered where the rest of her was, the parts that had been jettisoned as unsuitable for her gender and class. The character who showed those might have been interesting. We hear her desire to have revenge (which she pushes down) and her (gasp!) late pregnancy, which shocks and offends her daughters, that a woman in her late thirties or early forties was still having sex. Other than that, she’s factory-model.

I felt like the novel lacked focus. There’s a long anecdotal story about a guy named Lazarus (or the Spanish version of that name) who went to the body pits before he was dead and recovered from the flu so he came back to town and everyone thought he was raised from the dead. Anne Rice does that a lot, where she has stories peppered throughout a longer work which, while adding a lot of bulk, make a rich tapestry of time and place. One of the things I liked best about this novel was learning about a time and place I don’t know much about. More of these vignettes would have expanded that, but there was just the one story and then we went back to the Morales family and his attempts to fight agrarian reform.

By the time Francisco Morales senior dies, the author probably presumes that we are connected to him as a character, won to his side by his nobility and his love for his wife. The dude takes like 45 minutes to die, which he does as dramatically as an opera character. Honestly, it made me kind of roll my eyes. Despite spending so much time on him in the previous dozen hours, I still didn’t feel like he was someone I really cared about. It was like reading about the Romanavs; tragic, yes, but honestly, anyone who knows about the causes of the Bolshevek revolution knows that they kind of had it coming. I should have grieved more, because the boy lost his father, but I didn’t care that much about the boy either. I guess I was resisting the book’s subtle theme that seemed to be saying “this is a truly noble man, this is the kind of man who matters, all the other lives are really there to support him.” Even things like Francisco Junior saying (as an old man) that Hortensia made his soup for him, just made him less likeable. There are real men who matter, and there are the underlings whose work makes their lives easier, and Francisco Morales was one of the real men. I identify too much with the serfs who wanted to rise up and overthrow their opressor, even if they were murderers. Hearing about all of Morales’ attempts to keep the reform movement from taking away his legal right to be a feudal lord was like hearing Scarlett O’Hara wring her pretty white hands and long for the day in which black hands would be picking cotton again. I get that you’re fighting for your family, but you do understand you’re not on the side of justice, right? That what you’re fighting for involves the suffering and oppression of others? But no, Francisco Morales dies believing that he has lived his life with honor.

I hoped that the end of the novel would complete some kind of narrative arc that made sense to me, but even the story of Francisco Junior and Simonopio didn’t feel satisfying. Junior and Simonopio are separated soon after their dad’s death, and Junior is too self-absorbed to take a train ride to visit his brother until decades later. So in the end he goes, finally, back to Linares, to be reunited with his brother and presumably die of exposure, unless it’s meant to be vague and plausibly magical that they’ll somehow just fade into the sunset.

This book felt too much like Gone with the Wind, in that it was recreating nostalgia for a lost era, and not enough like Gone with the Wind in that at least Scarlett O’Hara was a passionately active and unforgettable character who underwent plot-fueling setbacks that she overcame. The Cortez-Morales family are supposed to be the heroes, but they’re one-dimensional characters I never really rooted for because they were too self-absorbed. When Simonopio and his bees discover the secret that will save the family’s lands for decades, it felt like God was siding with the oppressors, which left a bad taste in my mouth. Espiricueta, who would have been the hero in most of the novels, had a couple of heinous crimes tacked-onto him so that we couldn’t root for him either.

I think the best thing about The Murmur of Bees was the setting, and if the sensory details had been amped up, it might have been a lovely escapist period piece. I think if it hadn’t been so long and tedious, I might have enjoyed it more, but it felt so much like drudgery to listen to that only the prospect of writing this review kept me going. The spiritual monologue in the end didn’t land with me either, because it was delivered by a self-absorbed guy whose emotional maturity is so stunted that he can’t be bothered to visit his supposedly-beloved brother for like 60 years. I’m glad I finished it, because it felt like I’d achieved a difficult and unpleasant chore. I don’t recommend this unless you really love historical family epics (can’t call it a drama, dramas have plot and characters) and you’re willing to overlook a scattered focus, tasteless morality, and unsympathetic characters.

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