Every sentence is as gentle with the reader as Sidi is with his bees, carrying you softly over the rolling hills of the countryside to your destination. Finally, around the halfway mark, the action ramps up as Sidi tries to discover the killer and a young man in the village goes missing.Īlthough the stakes are raised, Manai never loses sight of his soft, lyrical storytelling.
Like a bee, Manai flits in and around the inciting incident of the novel-the murder of Sidi’s precious bees. He tells of Sidi’s past, and describes him interacting lovingly with his “girls,” the honeybees he keeps.
He introduces the different forces at work in in the countryside, and the connections between the residents of Nawa. For the first half, Yamen Manai takes his time to set the scene. Like a lot of African literature, this is a different taste from typical Western novels. As world politics begin to encroach on the country’s natural resources, Sidi discovers that every bee in one of his hives has been viciously murdered. Sidi is a beekeeper in Nawa, a small village where children who want to attend school must travel ten kilometers over the steppe and a young man gathers fallen fruit to trade for fish in the next village over.
Part allegorical and part satirical, The Ardent Swarm follows various citizens of a fictional Arab country, where religious extremists and foreign hornets are taking over.
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