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 19: Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

I imagine a lot of unimaginative reviews of this book say something like, Eleanor Oliphant is not Completely Fine, contrary to the title! and then they laugh at their own tiny joke for four hours. You won’t find that here, even though it is both true and apposite. Instead you’ll see me saying: this is a really great book. Even forgetting the inspired name of the protagonist, which never stops sounding like the name of an elegant elephant, it’s really good. Eleanor Oliphant lives alone and has forged an existence for herself of work, trips to the local Tesco Metro, and gentle, vodka-infused oblivion on the weekends. She doesn’t deal well with people. In fact, Oliphant displays an almost total lack of empathy. At first, you suspect that she may be autistic, since she shows all the signs: difficulty relating to others, low tolerance for leaving her routines, having to learn the outward signs of emotions by rote and experience, rather than innately understanding the differe
2 comments
Read more

Review 7: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

The first thing you see when you open Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is six pages of quotes from reviews saying how good it is. If you’re like me (and with any luck you’re not), you’ll think: talk about putting yourself under pressure . Happily, Gyasi more than rises to the implicit challenge set by her voluminous praise. The scope of her book - following two branches of an African family tree as they become separated by time and distance – is beautifully realised, with each chapter representing another generational step down. Homegoing is, in its clearest sense, about the reverberating impact of slavery on black people, both in the lands they were ripped from and the lands they were taken to. But the core theme that ties the book together is connection between those two strands of people. The title could be considered a reference to ‘returning’ to Africa, but I think it’s more powerful when considered as more abstract – the re-binding of the strands of people who have been separa
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 1: Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, by Anna Funder

My rating: 5 of 5 stars I am hungover and steer myself like a car through the crowds at Alexanderplatz station. How could you not love a book that begins like that? Early on in Stasiland , Anna Funder discusses the ‘puzzle women of Nuremberg’. This is a group of underfunded people (both men and women, oddly) who spend their days piecing together the scraps of documents the Stasi hurriedly shredded at the end of their regime. It feels like an apt analogy for Funder’s book itself – she carefully and brilliantly pieces together a view of what it was like to live in East Germany, and the effect it’s had on its citizens decades after the Berlin Wall was wrenched down, from snapshot interviews, research and her own experiences… despite the fact that most people she encounters would rather sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened. I came to this book knowing that East Germany was run as a Communist surveillance state, but little else. That was no problem.
1 comment
Read more