(courtesy Allen & Unwin Book Publishers)
Love is way more weighty and muscular and substantial than many people give it credit for.
There is a prevailing idea that romantic love is wispy and wafty, all red roses and swoons and sighs and dreamy looks at your beloved, and while yes, all of those elements factor in somewhere when it comes to love, true love, the reality is that for love to truly gain a foothold, to really make an impact in your life, that it has to compete with and best a host of neuroses and issues, all of which we carry in bucketloads if we’re being truly honest with ourselves.
Rom-coms generally would have you believe that you simply need to fall for someone and everything will neatly and calmly take care of itself, but we all know that’s not true, right, which is why a novel like Dancing With Bees by Anna Maynard is such a breath of fresh air, genre-wise.
In this story of Sunny Moritz, a thirty-three-year-old single woman living in Tasmania, we don’t get the usual tired and tedious sense that tumbling headlong into love is just a simple matter of meeting the right person and let the chips fall where they may.
Sunny has issues; no more or less than anyone else, and certainly less than she thinks she does – we’re always harder on ourselves than anyone else is, alas – and so her path to love is every bit as complicated, messy and uncertain as it would be in real life.
I grunted and accelerated, the parting of the clouds above me closing up again.
But there was something there. I’d seen it, at least for a moment.
And therein lies the joy of Dancing With Bees.
While there is an effortless verve to the novel and a peppy vibe to the adroitly written dialogue, ripe with sparkling oneliners and pithy emotional honesty, it is also more than happy to admit, and liberatingly so, that we don’t always make the right decisions at the right times (or sometimes at all) and so, the journey to the rest of our loved-up life can take a good deal longer than it might otherwise.
Talk about taking some of the pressure off!
Because while rom-coms offers deliciously escapist delights and a vibrantly reassuring sense that anything is possible and that it’s more than capable, when it pops up its giddy head, of making our lives far more wondrous than they were before, there’s also this nagging feeling, a weight one at that, that we might not ever get there in real life.
That falling in love is all wishes and unicorns and glittery aspiration, and not mired in our flawed self-perception and inability to know a good thing when we see it.
And good lord, has Sunny seen a good thing in hunky, beekeeping scientist Al De Jong who she decides has shortened his real name of “Alan” (not his name) and who helps her set up her backyard hives, an act which not only gets the wheels of long-gestating love turning, but which impels Sunny, in stop-start degrees to make some fairly big life changes.
(courtesy Calidris Literary Agency)
Sure, she’s sleeping friends-with-benefits-wise with sexy doctor Adam Harrison, with whom she is reacquainted at a school reunion, a development she thinks is fine because she isn’t relationship material – pssst there’s that flawed self-perception at self-sabotaging work right there – but little by little she begins to realise that all the unfixable things in her ailing life may not be so beyond repair after all.
Maybe she can draw closer to her benignly estranged parents, whom she sees sort of regularly but only because her wonderful brother Tommy keeps dragging her along to family dinners and the like, and perhaps it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that she could get back to her first and great love dancing, not only for herself but as a way of giving back to the community?
What really works with all these slow-burning life developments is that Maynard does not pretend at any point in Dancing With Bees that you simply make a decision and put it into action.
Were that that was the case!
No, life is rarely that straightforward because we are all so good at not making it that easy, and Dancing With Bees acknowledges and embraces that truism, rendering not just Sunny but the narrative itself in very grounded and emotionally honest terms, and in so doing, enriching the love story that runs gloriously and messily through it such it becomes something really special and authentic.
With his arms either side of me, I let myself imagine, for the short time it took to go home, that Al was my man, and I was his girl.
It’s that authenticity that makes Dancing With Bees so very special.
Sure, we all want love of the weak knees and fast beating heart kind, but then we also want it to feel at least a little possible; we likely suspect that love, true love can’t ever be that good, since rom-coms do set a fizzily high bar but when you read a novel as well written and as emotionally grounded as Dancing With Bees, you feel like you might just get your romantic magic and your real love story too.
So, a have your cake and eat it too; but with bees and hunky men and a life reborn in some fairly real but lovely ways – what’s not to love there?
There’s a lot to love in fact, not least Sunny who is fabulously honest, even when she’s not being honest at all, and who brings so much hope to whatever she does even as she internally monologues to herself that it will likely all fall in a heap, anyway.
She’s a protagonist who’s delightfully flawed and messy and so wonderfully human, and as she takes steps to reinvent herself, at first by accident and reluctantly but then with a mounting sense that it’s not all a fool’s errand after all, you fall in love with her, with what awaits her and how she gets all the good things but in a way that feels very normal and human.
Dancing With Bees is proof that you can swoon and sigh and fall onto a bed of unconditionally loved roses but also deal with some pretty intense and substantial stuff too, and that love, far from being flittery, jittery and floaty, might in fact be something far more solid and life transformative (and funny!) than you ever thought possible.