The Ardent Swarm by Yamen Manai

The battle raged. The hornets harried and charged him from every direction. Some tried to slip through the folds of his suit to reach his flesh, others violently flung themselves against his helmet, and he saw their eyes up close--red, as if injected with blood. Their stingers pierced the stitches of his garment and the veil of his helmet, narrowly missing him. But Sidi had always been incredibly dexterous. He was the son of the mountains and the hills, accustomed to its animals and insects. His mind and movements were still sharp, protected from the weight of his years by the nectar produced by his girls. They were watching over him the same way he watched over them.

Sidi is a beekeeper in North Africa who produces some of the region's best honey. His secret is love: he calls his bees "his girls" and watches over them with an intense fervor. But his girls, and his livelihood, are threatened by the arrival of a new predator, the giant Chinese hornet, which can tear an entire hive apart in a matter of minutes. At the same time, Sidi's unnamed country is dealing with a predatory upheaval of its own. Having just cleared the way for its first-ever elections, the polls are led by a group of religious fundamentalists who wear all black. The fundamentalists are intent on winning the election, whether that means providing food and clothing to potential voters, or rounding up apostates in the desert and cutting off their heads. 

I fear there's not much to say about Tunisian author Yamen Manai's The Ardent Swarm. It is no more or less than this obvious metaphor: the fundamentalists in black are the hornets who have arrived with the threat of violence and destruction. (There might be something said, however, about the way the novel analogizes the fundamentalists to a threat from "outside," as something that has been imported from somewhere else--not a homegrown danger, even as it presents one local character who is seduced by the fundamentalists to join them.) It's a nice touch that Sidi, who lives in the hills like something of a wild man, is and remains more or less ignorant of the fundamentalist threat. Sidi and his allies are taken up instead with their solution to the hornet problem: a trip to Japan to carry home Japanese queens. These bees are the only ones to have invented a strategy to defeat the hornets; they surround them in a ball and basically smother, or overheat, them to death. This is "the ardent swarm," and what it suggests is that if the citizens band together, perhaps at the ballot box, they can defeat the threat of a fundamentalist takeover. The novel wisely lets that remain to be seen, though it's curtains for the hornets.

With the addition of Tunisia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 119!