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Review 30: The Bees by Laline Paull

The Bees
There is not much better on Earth than a bee. Bees and ants are fascinating, as much for their social structures and integrated intelligence as for their individual values. When humans are smeared off the world like so much spilled jam, it won’t be the chimps or the gorillas that take pride of place – it’ll be the ants or the bees. Take my word for it, I say in the full knowledge that if I’m wrong there’s literally no way you’ll be able to tell me so (my favourite kind of situation).

This is presumably what inspired Laline Paull to write The Bees, a sort of nature-fantasy book about a worker bee who transcends her born station in various ways. It’s a love-letter to the hive and all the curious ways that bees work together.

Paull has clearly done a lot of research, which pays off enormously. The world within the hive feels full, with details pulled from real life to describe Flora 717’s existence. She doesn’t pander to the audience – never explaining why bees do something, or what propolis is – but you could come to the book knowing a fat squilch about our fuzzy little friends and still enjoy it.

I’m not totally sure what age group this is for. It almost feels at time like Young Adult fantasy, but then something very dark and adult will happen to throw you off a little. I actually quite liked that – it makes it accessible without losing its sense of danger.

As with all good sci-fi, fantasy or speculative fiction, Paull uses the world of the bee to shine a light on the grimbo world of the human. This was a badly-written sentence. Not all good sci-fi uses the medium of the bee. Just wanted to clear that up.

Anyway, the way that Flora 717 challenges and bounces about through the hive’s rigid social structures is a clear indictment of our own class systems, and the power of religion to enforce them. She does take a little poetic licence in the way bees work in order to do this – delineating bee hierarchy by families of plant and using antennae as sort of head-wands to make people do their bidding – but it’s effective and close enough to the truth to work.

Its relationship with royalty is interesting. On the one wing, it decries the social structures that have allowed such a hierarchy to occur. On the other, it’s very sympathetic to the Queen, and the ultimate goal is for Flora 717 to, in various ways, get closer to her and achieve a higher status. So it’s never quite clear where the author stands on it. In reality, of course, bee queens are sort of force-fed egg-laying machines rather than bee royalty, so tying it to a traditional human structure is a conscious choice from the author to allow her to explore this stuff. In any case, it does provoke thought.

There’s violence, there’s religion, there’s graphic bee-on-flower pollen collection. What more do you want?

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