Fortunate happenstance has led to me reviewing Laline Paull’s The Bees alongside Dave Goulson’s A Sting in the Tale. I am more than a little obsessed with bees, honey, watching wildlife and reading dystopias, and am therefore predisposed to find both books interesting. Together they make a splendid double-header of fiction and non-fiction: there is a precision and economy to the former and an almost lazy charm to the latter that makes them remarkably complementary. Where The Bees captures the fervor and fierceness of hive life from the perspective of one of its workers, A Sting in the Tale is very much the narrative of a friendly professor sitting in a garden, holding forth on his favourite subject while watching a bumblebee buzz by.
Paull’s novel is riveting. Flora 717 is of ignoble kin, the very humblest of workers in a honeybee hive: the Sanitation workers. All other workers are associated with specific flowers: where Teasel kin work the Nurseries, Thistle kin guard the hive, and Sage priestesses govern in the Queen’s name, Floras are dismissed as unworthy of differentiation and forbidden to speak. But from her first emergence 717 is marked by a Sage priestess as unusual: much larger and uglier than her kin, she nevertheless has the capacity to produce royal jelly, called Flow, at a time when the hive is in dire need of more nurses. This first distinction leads to more, and Flora 717 gradually learns the hive’s inner workings — and troubling secrets.
The prose is lovely without being distracting, and the way Paull relays the bees’ world through scent, heat, and movement is immensely successful. There were points at which I was jarred by a sudden anthropomorphization — a bee prodding another bee with a stick, for instance — but for the most part I loved the stylistic choices governing the bees’ language and life. The bees learn the Latin names of flowers by seducing them through pollination; they name all enemies of the hive The Myriad; they have scent-painted histories of the hive in a sort of library. It’s evocative and beautiful.
Working in a tradition of anthropomorphised animal fables such as Animal Farm and Watership Down, Paull distinguishes herself: instead of using the rhythms and mores of animals as a central metaphor for political or social allegory, The Bees begins and ends with the hive, effectively dramatizing its lifecycle without the sound of any one axe grinding in the background. Indeed, the somewhat extraneous frame narrative — a man looking at the hive while considering whether or not to sell the land it’s on — brings this home: humans layer the hive with their own meanings, but the bees are utterly indifferent to them, and their respective stories and realities do not match.
The laid-back, avuncular congeniality of Goulson’s rambling Sting in the Tale makes quite a contrast to Flora 717’s compelling, high-stakes story. Book-ended with the story of the British short-haired bumblebee’s introduction to New Zealand, subsequent extinction in the UK, and very recent plans for its reintroduction with New Zealand stock, Tale melts memoir and conservation issues into a sweet pot, moving from subject to subject very much in the manner of a foraging bee seeking flowers.