The Bees

This is a very ambitious and interesting book. A book told from the perspective of a bee. Lots of thought has gone into the careful worldbuilding here. However, because it's such an alien setting, it is often unclear what the rules are. This takes me out of the story. For example, and I don't think this is too much of a spoiler to tag, the protagonist bee changes jobs from being a drone to being a bee who goes out to gather pollen. Now, this was probably necessary from a plot perspective, but the first part of the book hammers home this idea that the bees' social roles are immutable. So to some extent we've had the rug pulled out from under us. So what are we to take as the rules the story is playing by? Because a lot of the tension comes from the protagonist bee's attempts to subvert other aspects of the hive's rules.

The setting, the concept, the worldbuilding are all a lot of fun. The story however, kind of falls flat. It is undermined by a lack of clarity as to what the rules of the story should be.

I have been intrigued by the premise of The Bees by Laline Paull since I read a number of other bloggers' reviews earlier in 2015 so I was very happy when Dave bought a copy for his Kindle. That Amazon Houseld setting means we get to share each other's books! Paull has obviously done a lot of research into the real world life of a bee hive throughout the year and this expertise shines through. However I was much less convinced by her humanising of them. I think my main problem with this novel was the massive contradiction of Flora 717's life. On the one hand we are constantly being told that each bee is born to a certain destiny and can absolutely never change her place in hive society. Yet our heroine skips through every class and job with scarcely ever a check on her behaviour. While I accept that this device allowed us as readers to visit every stage of bee life, for me it took away from the tale's credibility. With the exception of the wonderfully cartoonish drones, there isn't much in the way of fully rounded characterisation in The Bees which made it difficult to empathise and I always felt somewhat distant from the story. I did like how much I learned through reading The Bees, but as a reading experience it was lacking in enough depth to really keep my interest.

I picked this up on audiobook as an Editor's Pick in an Audible sale, and didn't pay as much attention to the description as I probably should have. I read another reviewer's summary:

"This creative Regency thought- and speech-tinged, sci-fi, fantasy, dystopian novel begins as Flora 717 emerges from her birth chamber. Born of the Flora caste, the sanitation caste, Flora 717 is larger than those typical in her caste and has the capacity for speech, not typical of her caste, her kin. These “deformities” require the police to administer the “kindness” (removal by death) to Flora 717. It is Flora 717’s good fortune that she is save by the curiosity-driven help and encouragement of Sister Sage, of the priestess caste. And, so begins a life in which Flora 717 will demonstrate her courage and resolve to save her hive time and again."

Somehow I got the impression from this description that this book was a sf/fantasy type story just drawing on the metaphor of bees ... nope. This is actually a story about bees, in a bee hive. The author gets quite creative in anthropomorphizing the bees and the everyday life of the hive, as the story follows a sanitation bee through a series of bee-adventures.

It was an interesting picture of a beehive hierarchy, which I'd consider more appropriate for young adult level readers. However, I was never really sucked into the story because the main bee character, Flora 717, never seems to really develop a personality or have any agency in the story. Almost all her actions seem guided simply by instinct or circumstance, and you never feel she is an independent character or that she actually makes any meaningful decisions; everything is presented as if she does it because it seems to be the right thing at the time. So she drifts through a series of incidents and adventures, but I never felt I could really cheer for her; it was just like watching a series of predetermined events fall into place. So ... interesting and unique idea for a story, but ultimately felt a bit flat to me.