The Bees by Laline Paull
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Fascinating Life of a Special Sanitation Bee When Flora 717 breaks out of her emergence chamber as a generic "flora," belonging to no particular flower kin and destined to be a lowly Sanitation worker, her beehive is experiencing an extraordinarily cold summer, so that her roughly 8,000 sisters are hungry and on edge: "They say the season is deformed by rain, the flowers shun us and fall unborn, the foragers are falling from the air and no one knows why." The scary fertility police are keen to detect deformity or abnormality in new bees and give them “the Kindness” ("From death comes life eternal"), and Flora is unusually large and ugly. Fortunately for her and for the readers of Laline Paull’s fascinating novel The Bees (2014), Sister Sage (a bee priestess) sets Flora on an unprecedented path towards self-development and hive-knowledge. Soon Flora is visiting different parts of the hive and doing different things, including feeding larvae, attending to spoiled drones ("their malenesses"), meeting the Queen, and being promoted to forager. As the most basic law of the hive is that “only the Queen may breed” and violating it is the grossest treason, Flora is conflicted when something sentient seems to be pressuring the inside her abdomen. . . To live and learn, she must deal with the Myriad, the numerous bee-foes like venomous wasps, beautiful dragonflies, cursing crows, and oily spiders, and with the controlling hive impulse for conformity (“Accept, Obey, and Serve”), all in the context of human activities hostile to bees like mass farming of single crops and overuse of poison. We learn in the prologue that the beehive's orchard is under siege, "a dullard's patchwork of corn and soy" on one side and "a light-industrial development" on the other, and that the owner of the orchard is planning to sell it. Paull depicts life in a beehive with panache, from realistic features like the specializing of roles, the gathering of nectar and pollen, the making of wax and honey, the feeding of the young, the maintenance of the hive, the killing of invasive wasps, the quasi-hibernation of the winter cluster, and the legendary “Visitation” of the beekeeper, to imaginative extrapolations like scent-gates, chemical stories, hive mind utterances, and the religion of the Queen: "Our Queen, who art in labor, hallowed be thy womb." And she does lots of vivid, beautiful, and imaginative writing, like "She felt the cool, soft press of its petal tunnel, then a shiver of delight as its pollen brushed against her fur. A bead of nectar pulsed sweetness, and she stretched out her tongue." But although to tell Flora’s story Paull writes much bee-appropriate behavior (e.g., like grooming fur, drinking nectar, communicating via antennae and chemical scents, breathing through spiracles, grabbing with leg hooks, and giving directions by dancing), she also anthropomorphizes her subjects to engage our emotions more than necessary. Her bees feel guilt or scorn or smile or sob or curtsey or clap their hands or don pomade or rev their engines. Her intense focus on mother's love seems too human and hence too alien to my notion of a beehive. She ruins a fine account of Flora's terrifying encounter with the "heavy magnetic throb" of a metal tree by identifying it as a cell phone tower. She also loses track of Flora's character when, after early on demonstrating the bee's accurate ability to identify the gender of baby bees, she later has her fail to do so for no other reason than to surprise us. But for the most part Paull impressively uses bee biology to imagine bee culture and psychology to tell an absorbing and moving story. Although Flora's relationship with Sir Linden would be impossible for a real bee, it is interestingly stranger than a typical human romance. Reading the novel does make one see the world from the point of view of the tiny, hard-working creatures and regret the decrease in wildflowers and the over-use of poisons. Paull has a critical view of authority figures and power wielders like police and priestesses, and some readers compare her book to 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale, but I think The Bees is much stranger and brighter. Her novel more resembles Richard Adams' Watership Down (which blends biology and imagination to depict the quest of a group of rabbits for a new home) and T. H. White's The Book of Merlin (which imagines life in an ant colony to comment on human nature and society). If you appreciate bees and sf about aliens who are very human in some ways, you should like this remarkable novel. The reader of the audiobook, Orlagh Cassidy, is excellent, especially with the brutal fertility police, arrogant drones, hyper bluebottles, inimical wasps, and Flora 717, but perhaps she overdoes it for malevolent characters like Sister Sage, who sounds like the good witch from The Wizard of Oz movie twisted to the dark. That is, even though the novel is very much for adults, with plenty of graphic violence and some sex, Cassidy often seems to be reading it for children. View all my reviews
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