The Bees - Laline Paull

This is the story of an extraordinary bee trying to deal with hand she's been dealt.

I picked this up off the shelf at the bookshop thinking it was a story about evil bees turning against mankind and attacking humans, like The Birds. In my head, I thought that would be awesome. That's not what this book is about though. It's about Flora 717, a cleaner bee, the lowest rank of all the bees in the hive. but Flora 717 isn't an ordinary cleaner bee, she's bigger and browner and uglier than her peers and also she has the ability to talk, which other cleaner bees don't have.

Laline Paull was an accomplished playwright before she turned her hand to novels. Her plays have taken on big social issues, such as in her play Boat Memory.

So my first thought going into this book was "Why Bees?", but as I thought about it, it made sense. Bees have a natural order of things, and would be an excellent way of making a comment about society. Everyone has a job and rank or class, everyone knows their place and everyone must be blindly devoted to the queen and hive. It's like nature's 1984. 

I got started on the book and thought I was spot on. The penny had dropped and obviously this novel is meant to make us look at ourselves, and was a metaphor for people. Awesome, let's get into this I thought. I wanted to see how deep this would go.

But over the rest of the book, gradually the bees started to seem less and less human like, and in the end I finished the book thinking I was wrong, and they were just bees. The book seems to swap between humanised bees and just regular bees, which left me feeling detached form the story and the characters. If the bees were secretly people I'd feel invested and care about what happens - I'm a person so I can empathise with people. If the bees are bees then I can't relate - I am not a bee so I can't really empathise with bees. It seems the author couldn't decide on what book she was writing.

However, Laline has done her research about bees. I learnt a little bit about what goes on in a beehive and what bees get up to. And it is a unique angle to take - the bee thing. I've read that people found this book to drag and be quite dry, but I found it enjoyable. The pacing was odd at times (very fast and then very slow) but overall it was readable. 

So overall, I think the book was middling. It teased the reader with making some sort of point but in the end it never really got there.

What did you think? Did you enjoy this book? Let me know in the comment