Skip to main content

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?

--

This is my thirtieth book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review 5: Gulp - Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

When it comes to the works of Mary Roach, this ain’t my first Roach-eo - I’ve previously read and been entranced by Stiff , her foray into the world of corpses. But I still wasn’t expecting to like this book quite so much as I did. It’s one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had for a long time. Gulp is a hotchpotch journey down the alimentary canal - the big vacuum cleaner bag that runs from our mouths to our exit wounds. Roach isn’t writing a medical textbook here though. She follows the stories of things that sound interesting, or gross, or (regularly) both, so you end up with quite a lot of stuff that’s tangentially-related rather than a tube-by-tube account of your inner passages. And that’s all for the betterment of the book. Here are a few facts and amusing asides I noted down during reading: Fabric softener works by slightly digesting the fibres of your clothes, using the same enzymes as in your guts. Painting restoration workers often spit on swabs to take layers...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 4: I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

I Love Dick is a book whose title feels like a deliberate trick to make you aware of other people looking at you when reading it on a train. I’m certain that it will have been a publishing decision to catch the eye. I look forward to seeing the same publisher’s follow-up hits, Eat All Puppies and I’m Not Racist, But… Publishing chicanery aside, ILD is, in its through-line, about a woman who develops a mostly one-sided infatuation with a man called Dick (get it? The title was a phallusy). But it’s an indirect plotline, with plenty of other ruminations about gender, art, politics and more thrown in too. “Plotline” may not be quite the correct term to use, given that the basis for the book is essentially autobiographical, and it reads like a memoir in the clothes of literature – or possibly the other way around. You’re certainly aware that these are real people being discussed, none more so than the author, Chris Kraus, who brings her whole self to bear on the page, with all the m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 33: The Veiled Woman by Anaïs Nin

Okay, so it’s basically my own fault for not properly researching what I was reading. I knew of Anaïs Nin as a writer of fiction and essays, so when I picked up this slim volume of short stories, I thought little of it. But as it turns out, she also wrote erotic literature. I’ve reviewed quite a few graphic novels during this 100 Book Year, but this is my first set of graphic short stories. And by graphic , I don’t mean it has pictures. I took this to read this on the train, and as my misconception became clearer, found myself regularly glancing anxiously at the woman next to me in case she could read the content of the page I was on and now considered me a Public Transport Pervert. It’s important to consider these stories in their proper context. Nin, a complex and controversial character, wrote mostly in the 1940s within a circle of mostly-male literary elite, and sought to find her place at the lead of it. She’s widely considered ground-breaking in the West as a woman writ...
Post a Comment
Read more