Laline Paull - The Bees

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

I'm afraid I didn't get on at all well with this book. Other reviewers whose opinions I respect liked it a lot but I really, really didn't.

The narrative is of the life of a lowly worker bee in a hive, who has gifts above her birth. It purports to be based on how bees interact and their social organisation, but I'm afraid it didn't convince me in any way. The characters seemed to me to be crude stereotypes designed to make allegorical points about social exclusion, sexism and the like. I am all in favour of this, but it was so crudely done as to be simply risible in places - more like a clumsy Disney cartoon than a novel with serious, subtle points to make.

The depiction of the hive and the colony was too much for me to take as well. I fully accept that some anthropomorphism is necessary and acceptable in a book like this, so I was prepared to be pretty forgiving - but there surely are limits. Doors into rooms of the hive? Sanitation bees with dustpans and brushes? Bees with hands and human-like genitalia (and human-like desires and abuses)? Perhaps things like this would have worked if handled rather more subtly and intelligently, but to me it just felt absurd and, to be honest, patronising. The book read to me like an attempt at a mixture of Brave New World, Watership Down and TH White's (brilliant) depiction of an ant colony in The Sword In The Stone, but without the intelligence, depth or finesse of any of them.

I'm genuinely sorry to have to say all this because I dislike writing very critical reviews of books, especially when an author has tried to do something unusual and imaginative, but I'm afraid that's my honest response. Plenty of discerning people liked this, so do read their reviews before dismissing it on my say-so, but I really can't recommend this.