A review of the novel “The Beekeeper Of Aleppo” by Christy Lefteri
There is a certain fashion for novels to have a title in the format “The [common noun of an occupation] Of [proper noun of a place of peril]” – think “The Bookseller Of Kabul”, “The Tatooist Of Auschwitz” and “The Cellist Of Sarajevo”. I was particularly attracted to this particular work because I spent a few days in the city of Aleppo just a couple of weeks before the outbreak of the civil war in 2011.
For Lefteri who teaches creative writing at London’s Brunel University, this is clearly a deeply personal and even polemical novel. Her own parents were refugees from Northern Cyprus after the Turks invaded the island and later she spent two summers in Athens working as a volunteer in a centre supporting refugees mainly from Syria and Afghanistan. So this is not storytelling merely for entertainment and, at the end of the book, the reader is invited to engage with the issues raised by the story through support for one of a number of relevant groups.
The narrator of the novel is the eponymous apiarist Nuri Ibrahim and the beginning of the work finds him with his artist wife Afra in a bed and breakfast in a seaside resort on the south England coast awaiting the outcome of their claim for asylum. As the story moves forward by weeks, there are a whole series of flashbacks to explain how, over a traumatic period of months, they fled the Syrian war and travelled via Turkey and Greece to the safety and security of a Britain which is not universally welcoming of refugees.
Lefteri’s writing style is deceptively plain but, as the story unfolds, we learn the true scale of the suffering of Nuri and Afra (and other refugees) and we find that the writer deploys a number of stylistic devices. It is a tale about “the randomness of pain, how life can take everything from you all at once”, but it is an immensely moving narrative that ultimately offers compassion and hope.