"...Dreamt of Bees [is] a literary YA novel which is psychologically complex in the vein of Mark Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime or A Separate Piece by John Knowles. It a is highly character driven story with a touch of the spiritual about coming of age with a psychological handicap, schizophrenia and aspergers, the state of modernity, and understanding homosexuality.
After Ian's friend dies under mysterious circumstances, Ian reconstructs his teenage years to discover not only how the death happened, but also to figure out himself in relation to a world that seems to him to be increasingly slipping into a state of unreality. His only other friend, a boy with the odd name Serata, is possibly implicated as a murderer. However, there is only one problem: Serata may not actually exist.
At times lighthearted and funny, and at times dramatic and melancholy, it is a moving tale with a bittersweet ending and a unique voice. Dreamt of Bees is full of childhood mistakes and love, religion, family hardship and the struggle for meaning in our modern times, loneliness and friendship. Ian must confront the reason for Serata's creation to redeem himself in his own eyes and to find his own voice."
Schizophrenia and Asperger's are difficult subjects, largely because they are completely unknown diseases. While the book is researched as well as I can, of course there are artistic choices I had to make. The addition of a "fake" (possibly fake, you'll have to read it to find out) character is inconsistent with the reality of Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a socially driven disease - that is, it manifests itself as a cultural or social enemy attacking the diseased individual (for example, many report being under surveillance by machines; it is easy to draw the conclusion that our society's paranoia about machines is amplified in the mind of someone who cannot distinguish reality from fantasy). Its forms are as varied as the individuals who suffer from it, and the disease attacks the sufferer from a psychologically significant point. Thus actual split personalities, like in Fight Club, or sustained hallucinations of another person - these occurances are exceedingly rare and undocumented.
Similarly with Asperger's syndrome, the disease is a very personal one which varies from individual to individual, marked by an inability to read social situations or engage in social interactions. For example, I have a friend who thinks of nothing but numbers, they calm her down. Another friend just doesn't understand conversations, he rambles and insults, but plows ahead anyway because the feel of the conversation, the mood of the room, are not things that he grasps. Someone taking offense at him would likely catch him off guard, because he was not aware he was offending.
Regardless of how well known the diseases are, or how much I have bent them in telling the story, the main purpose of Dreamt of Bees is to show someone with severe troubles as a human being. Everyone has a unique experience of the world, and the individual representations of Aspergers and Schizophrenia really highlight this interesting feature of being human, that no two people are the same, that the world is a representation of unique psychological projections. That is - no two visions of reality are the same, and none are better, or more Real.
This calls into question Truth with a capital T. I don't condone relativism, there are inviolable truths. But these truths might take a form we aren't comfortable with, and never expected; truths that can't merely take a logical argumentative form. We can call it God, or Reality, or Psychology, or Magic, anything we capitalize with a letter to denote that the word is a stand-in for something Else, something Beyond, perhaps Everything, or Nothing at all.
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