The Bees by Laline Paull

I don’t know who the writer of The Bees is, but that’s probably one of the reasons why I languish in sad obscurity (not that I’m doing anything to change that, I do not – I do not – ever talk to anyone ever or go anywhere or do anything and I realise I would need to / will need to if I ever want anything to change (I’ll get round to it, sure, I promise)…) Because clearly the writer of The Bees is very well connected…

Or just time and culture and literature have moved on so far and so fast in the last ten years that what reads now as a perfectly serviceable beach read with a bizarrely gushing reputation genuinely was something, ten years ago, that smashed readers minds and expectations into tiny tiny pieces…

I’m not saying it’s bad – not at all, it’s a very enjoyable novel about a bee living its bee life through a one year cycle in the life of a hive – but it is a neat concept (bees but kinda like a fantasy novel) executed in a simple, direct, uncomplicated way. And that’s it.

It is telling a story rather than showing one (something that often I do like – I tend to be for anything that’s in opposition to the diktats of the CIA innit cuz I’m hip like that), with very little happening under the surface beyond what the reader experiences from the tight third person perspective (until the very end) of a singular bee.

(the writer is also a playwright and this checks out – this is prose as stage directions rather than prose as art itself…)

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I don’t know how true to real bee life this is.

Obviously, I know that bees can’t literally talk and can’t literally do mind control and telepathy with other bees… and I also know that spiders aren’t literally all-knowing sages who trade secrets about the future with the more higher level bees who let the spiders eat “lesser” bees as payment and obviously I know that all insects don’t secretly have a common language…

But I don’t know if mobile phone transmitter towers kill bees but don’t affect wasps…

I don’t know if how many days a baby bee is fed nutrients determines what type of adult bee it will become and thus how easy it is to make a new queen…

I don’t know if female bees kill all the male bees every Autumn and I don’t know if bees – other than queens – have roles for life that never change…

I don’t know if bee breeding and mating matches the way it is depicted here, with the cock being left inside the queen and the male bee dying (they say it’s kinda like that with people too, no?)

I don’t know any of this, even though all of the above appears in The Bees, because there is no helpful afterword about bee reality.

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Sorry, it’s now like five or six days later than when I wrote the above.

I got busy doing other things and then I got food poisoning (or something like it, anyway) that knocked me out for about a day and a half. (Don’t worry, I’ll go into more detail in the next one (unless so much time passes before I’m able to get fifteen minutes alone with my phone again that I don’t quite manage to squeeze that dribble of prose out before I’ve forgotten about the swirling vomit-filled sink filled with undigested food from a meal almost six hours earlier spinning around and around and around and around…)

Where was I going?

What was I going to say?

How did I feeeeeeel about this novel about bees???

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There’s a press quote on the front of this book that says “changes the way we see the world”, which is a big claim and one that implies that The Bees is a book with complexity, with depth, with nuance, with something big and important and serious to say.

It’s not really doing or offering any of those things – and that doesn’t mean it’s bad (!): a high concept beach read is a very valid and important type of book – but you could argue that it *is* changing “the way we see the world” by narrating, for three hundred pages or so, a world where bees are the most important things.

Much as any work of fiction changes “the way we see the world”, while we’re reading it, unless it’s fiction written by someone who knows you near-intimately and has based it on your life…

But, yes, it’s absolutely fine!

There’s excitement and fighting and (kinda?) romance, there’s mystery and magic and betrayals and sneaking around and all sorts of other fun plotty things one usually dreams of finding in a beach read.

But does it ever elevate itself out of a mere quasi-fantastical narrative about bees? Does it become a bleak mediation on climate catastrophe, or on dying bees, or on human erasure of the natural landscape, or on the loss of community and meaning within human lives, or perhaps even on the dangers and disgrace of autocratic hierarchical structures?

I’d say “no”, but if it was [meant to be] doing any of that, then it was doing it too damn subtle for me, and I’m someone who – between bouts of vomiting – is usually thinking about at least one of those things anyway.

I enjoyed it, yes.

And I did only read it because I watched (I don’t know if a verb that active is appropriate here) the Jason Statham movie The Beekeeper, so my hunger for bee schlock was probably at the highest it will ever “bee” (pun intended), so maybe had I read this more organically, I would have enjoyed it significantly less…

Who knows?

This time round – a few days before I spent hours vomiting another empty weekend away –  I liked it. I liked it.

Buzz buzz buzz.