The Beekeepers

by Peter Redgrove

What neglected powers lie behind the small phobias and fetishes, the minor perversities and self-inflicted accidents of ordinary life Guy and Matthew decide to find out. For Matthew, however, it is a serious and urgent matter. He is an alcoholic, and has just had an appalling attack of the DTs. His family doctor severely warns him, but he is also given extraordinarily helpful advice by a more sinister 'think of bees'. The two friends decide to help each other give up drink - by occult means. They will try to relinquish the ecstasies of drink and replace them with the visions of dowsing and spiritualism. It turns out that alcohol was a defence against deeper powers. Both men become superb dowsers, attracting swarming natural forces which are almost too strong for them. Both receive automatic writing from a murderous disemmbodied spirit. New thresholds of personality are revealed, but there is the sinister Institute for Study, also interested in bees, which is waiting to take advantage of these developments. Guy's wife Millie, a detached observer, is drawn closer and closer to the centre of these strange and terrible events. 'The Beekeepers' is an investigation of the magic and meaning of imagination. In it Peter Redgrove explores those forces which many consider to be 'occult' but which he believes to be natural forces concealed from our use by convention and timidity. The book also has an introduction by Peter Ackroyd. 'Redgrove has written one of his most hilarious and unsettling books yet.' (The Guardian) 'The Beekeepers' is filled with violence, madness, ghosts. And yet Redgrove's writing is powerful enough to make these spirits live, and The Beekeepers remains throughout an intriguing book.

132 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Peter William Redgrove was a British poet, who also wrote prose, novels and plays with his second wife Penelope Shuttle.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange hodgepodge of a novel. The premise—two alcoholic writers think about bees to help conquer their alcoholism—soon unravels as Redgrove’s eccentric musings on the occult take over, leaving us with a patchwork of poems, a kooky stageplay, and vaguely lucid essays peppered around the central nonplot.