Mireille Juchau’s latest novel is a buzzing hive of human fragility

Mireille Juchau’s third novel tackles issues of love, loss, damage and grief via the fragility of the natural world.

Supplied Editorial The World Without Us, by Mireille Juchau

‘‘If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.’’ The author of this sentence was Maurice Maeterlinck, a passionate Belgian apiarist who also happened to be a Nobel prize-winning playwright, so it should not surprise us that his 1901 monograph The Life of the Bee was often more poetic than practical. Contemporary science’s best guess is that humankind would merely suffer calamitous declines in crop yields and the loss of most fruits. So, famine and economic depression with no apples, oranges, coffee or chocolate to soften the blow.

Mireille Juchau’s third novel, a bright, bracing marvel of a book despite the bleak stuff from which it is made, does not lead-pedal ideas of imminent catastrophe; it is more cunning than that. What it does do is use anxieties about the frailty of those natural systems that sustain our lives as mood music for a domestic-scale story of love, loss, damage and grief.

For all the broader ecological intelligence brought to bear by its author, for all the ironic feints and intricate narrative craft involved in the tale’s unfolding, The World Without Us is a work that never cedes the centrality of the human in its efforts to transmit some big-­picture wisdom. It is a book that reminds us that even a single death can fall like an apocalypse on those left behind.

That one death belongs to Pip, the youngest daughter of Stefan and Evangeline Muller, a couple of middle-aged hippies carving out a marginal living on a hinterland farm somewhere on NSW’s verdant north coast. It was leukaemia, one of a cluster of cancers in the area that locals suspect may be related to waste water from nearby fracking projects.

Whatever the cause, Pip’s death has undone her once vibrant mother. Two remaining daughters, Tess and Meg, can only retreat into their respective solitudes as Evangeline first abandons her parental attentions, then her reason. Stefan, a German-born beekeeper with his own demons, watches on lovingly but helplessly, usually with a full glass in his hand.

It is a stranger to the town who saves Evangeline, if only for a time. Jim is a handsome escapee from a failed relationship in Sydney, now teaching at the local school and renting a modest cottage near the Mullers’ farm. When he happens across his neighbour bathing naked in the river, then strips off and joins her rather than running away, a challenge has been made and met. One suspects it won’t end well.

But this, in a sense, is front-office material. There is a much more going on in the narrative’s back rooms and basement. A crashed van is discovered on the Muller farm with a body inside. A doomsday prepper wanders the streets of the nearby township, bearing pamphlets with advice on surviving coming societal collapse. A former friend of Evangeline’s suggests this man is more closely connected to the Mullers than they admit. Secrets multiply, as the bee hives so assiduously kept by Stefan deplete.

Whether the bees are swarming because of pesticides or electromagnetic radiation, or climate change, or are simply being stolen, are questions left disquietingly open for much of the book. Yet this plot function is less important than the bees’ symbolic role. Hives are societies of rigidity and complexity, in which the needs of the collective ruthlessly override those of individual insects.

Their presence can’t help but raise questions about our vaunted human freedoms. The counterculture which grew up in this region preached sexual, political and economic liberation — yet the commune where Evangeline grew up was a place where roles were severely circumscribed. The Hive, as it was called, was a misogynistic inversion of the matriarchal beehive. What happened in that community continues to shape the lives of its former denizens.

These extraterritorial thoughts only arrive after the primary reading experience, however. Juchau is careful to ironise or undercut any pretensions to larger significance. It is an emotionally charged and psychologically acute portrait of individuals who have suffered, one that never stoops to patronise the eccentricities of their community in which they are embedded. Her prose, too, is a marvel of balance: witty and sensual, self-aware but not jaded, and capable of making poetry from anything — the contents of a fridge, say, or family lurgies during a wet Sydney winter:

Only the parents among them were forced out, following restive toddlers across sodden parks. They staggered through mud in rainproof jumpsuits, gumboots and hoods like undernourished visitors from some intergalactic zone. They all had persistent coughs. Their kids had weals, rashes, wheezes and chronic asthma, their noses were permanently lacquered with snot, and just as kids were up and well again they’d vomit, matter-of-factly, on to someone’s shoulder, and a new virus would do the rounds ...

And it is this polished ordinariness that draws you in, charms and moves you. Only gradually do the full implications of Juchau’s story emerge. Soon after finishing The World Without Us, I happened across an article online. It reported that in the year from April 2014, an estimated 40 per cent of the US’s bee population died off. The cause is unclear.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

The World Without Us

By Mireille Juchau

Bloomsbury, 320pp, $35