The Beekeeper's Apprentice or
   On the Segregation of the Queen
   Laurie R. King
  1994 St. Martin's Press NY USA
   ISBN: 0312104235


It's 1914 & young Mary Russell stumbles upon a retired beekeeper with an extraordinary past on the Sussex Downs. Both are unkempt & at a loss for direction yet recognize in each other's keen mind a fellow thinker & together they set out to solve a few local problems.

This was my introduction to Laurie King's work and it had me searching for the rest of her corpus. It's been a long time since I found something with that breadth of language. Something which drew me in with familiar mystery and curiosity.

Yes, this is indeed a work of fiction wherein a girl, on the verge of womanhood, a self-proclaimed feminist(although no man-hater!), a tall and unpretty nobody comes across a retired and dispirited Legend and an unholy and thoroughly platonic, often tender, often fractious, mentorship is entered into upon the wilds of Sussex before the Great War.

Laurie King has done her research well, I felt transported back to a time I knew well, not because I lived it, I was not yet born, I did, however, live among the trappings of that Age as a child, read the books of that time, courtesy of granduncles and grandaunts. I felt I could have been reading a Merchant/Ivory film, so picturesque is this author's skill. I relished her premise of a fabled Victorian misogynist well met upon a heath by a self-possessed, educated youth and bested by her too. Naturally it's because she's young, doesn't know what she cannot do or think, whereas he's passed his prime and a recovering addict. My, my how the clues do creep in!

I was thrilled to find a teenager who thought deductively and humorously and was also articulate about herself. And that's what Laurie King's book is all about - the fluency between the mind and the mouth. That Mary Russell and the Legend become companions in detection is inevitable, it is how they teach and tease, it is how these two orphans learn to care about and for each other and how Mary Russell is embraced by the Legend's small family, that makes for good reading.

In time Mary becomes a woman of means and it is those very means that get her into danger. It is only toward the end of the story, when rescue is at hand that you see what a partnership has been forged. While a nimble, youthful mind may solve mysteries, it takes an older, more devious mind to forsee evil!

And so, of course, I recommend The Beekeeper's Apprentice to the classical mystery reader and anyone who likes to see the yin and yang play out. And a hearty mention too of it's companion volume: A Monstrous Regiment of Women. And, by the way, you don't have to like mysteries, there's enough history, culture and philosophy to satisfy.
(04/12/99)

Rebecca