Yamen Manai's THE ARDENT SWARM (tr by Lara Vergnand)

Yamen Manai's lovely and tense The Ardent Swarm, the Tunisian author's first novel to be translated into English, has two villains,Vespa madarinia (what we in the US have dubbed Murder Hornets) and a rising political party that is mobilizing the countryside in favor of theocratic authoritarianism. But no, it's not set in the United States! Not everything is about us! For me, as for the novel's hero Sidi, it's all about the bees. 

Sidi is a beekeeper, a fixture in a village so small it doesn't even consider itself to be a village, in the fictional kingdom of Qafar, which is experimenting with democracy but is poised to reap that system's worst fruits as a demogogic fundamentalist "Party of God" is mounting a tremendous effort to convince the illiterate or barely literate citizens of the countryside to vote for them in exchange for gifts of food, clothing and blankets those citizens desperately need and, since they, like the rural poor in most places, don't really care who's in charge in the capital city, this strategy has every chance of working as our story starts.

But back to the bees and the beekeeper. Sidi is so devoted to the denizens of his hives that he refers to them as "his girls" and openly weeps when he finds that something has invaded one of them and brutally destroyed every last worker and drone, and even left the queen lying on her back, feebly kicking her wounded legs in the air before finally expiring. Reader, of course I cried. And immediately suspected, long before the other villain buzzed to the forefront of the novel's conflicts, that it was indeed the Giant Asian Hornet who had done the deed. But Sidi has never heard of such a thing; he's a simple man with profound knowledge and experience in one thing and one thing only, so this mysterious new threat not only to his livelihood but his entire existence is something he takes very seriously and approaches with a combination of deductive reasoning that would do Sherlock Holmes proud and a degree of physical courage that few of us could match.  He mounts a sleepless constant watch over his remaining hives -- he owes his beloved girls no less -- until he spots two of the thumb-length flying reconnaissance over his territory and marking the next hive for destruction with a reeking burst of pheromone attractants.

How did these monsters get here? Sidi's detective skills impress yet again as he discovers a surprising link between these invaders and the disturbing fundamentalists making weird promises to and demanding new levels of cultural and religious subservience from Sidi's friends and neighbors, who nonetheless come gladly to Sidi's aid when he decides that his plight calls for the kind of research he can't do with direct observation and experimentation and the kind of wise and careful, but slow, selective breeding that he has always employed to help his girls overcome previous threats -- fungal, bacterial, arachnoidal -- to their well-being, and this is where that title comes in.

An "Ardent Swarm" is the poetic name for a behavior that most of us who pay attention to things like murder hornets probably already know about, but was surprising new knowledge when Manai was writing this novel: bees who share the murder hornet's natural habitat have evolved a unique and devastatingly effective but costly defense: when one of these horrors lands on their doorstep, hundreds of worker bees pile on and around the invader's body and beat their wings and dance to generate kinetic energy, aka heat. The bees can tolerate higher temperatures than the hornets can, so the bees effectively cook their predator to death before it can do more damage. Of course, many workers get eviscerated by the hornet in the process of achieving the critical mass for an effective Ardent Swarm, but such is hive life. As long as the queen is safe!

The fact that this behavior strongly suggests itself as a metaphor for how Sidi's fellow visitors might respond to the threats posed by the Party of God and splinter groups that are more militant and less patient than the Party is delicately suggested but never explored outright; Manai is not writing a polemic or a guerilla warefare manual, he's writing a beautiful and tenderly observed novel about friendship, between man and bee, and between humans as well, as Sidi finds that his generosity over the years in sharing his knowledge and his honey has not gone unnoticed and will not go unrewarded. This is a strong contender for my best read of 2022.

I sure hope Manai and sound and unflashy translator Lara Vergnand bring more of his work to English language readers very soon. And now excuse me, I'm afraid I've gotten hooked on not one but two different versions of the casual mobile game of Ant Legion. Hymenoptera ahoy!