Maciek's Reviews > The Bees

It's a bit like The Handmaid's Tale, but in a beehive!

The Bees follows the existence of Flora 717, from the moment where she emerges as a conscious being - one of the Floras, sanitation worker bees, who are among the lowest classes of bees in the Hive. Most of her kin are mute and treated as inferior by other bees, but 717 is no ordinary Flora: it is soon discovered that she can not only speak, but also produce Flow - an important nourishing substance which is feed to the larvae. But there is more to Flora 717 than to any other bee in the Hive - something which can upset the very root of society that she came to inhabit...

This book is one of the "it" books of this season, but I don't really understand why. While The Bees certainly scores a point with creating a unique, anthropomorphic setting, but at the end of the day it's just one of the many dystopian novels which are a dime a dozen these days. It' no next Animal Farm or 1984, or even the aforementioned The Handmaid's Tale. Aside from the setting and the general idea, there is just too little to distinguish The Bees from most dystopian fiction which is flooding the market every other day. Repeated slogan sound familiar - accept, obey and serve! Only the Queen may Breed! - and concepts such as the Hive Mind and the ability of some bees to read the thoughts of others are nothing more than just another version of dystopic collectivism an the presupposition of individuality. These tropes form this genre and are expected to be found in novels in the canon, but reading them without new, creative ideas wrapped around them is like eating cakes without icing - they'll soon blend into one another and become indistinguishable.

This book is compared by some reviewers to one of my favorites, Watership Down. In my opinion the comparison doesn't hold, and is unfair to both books - The Bees truly looses when compared to this novel, and I'll explain why. Watership Down is one of my favorite novels, and is a truly beautiful story which resists genre classification and escapes all labels; it can and is read both by adults and children, who derive from it equal amounts of pleasure. The same can't be said of The Bees - I'm not sure what the target audience was: is it a novel for younger adults, who are just discovering the genre and try to understand the world around them through literature? Is it a novel for seasoned readers, who look for more substance in their fiction, even if its hidden behind flash and glitter? Or is it just pure, ordinary escapism, which we read for fun or nothing else? The book oscillates between all three, but never decisively puts its foot down.

Both books contain animal characters, but only Watership Down contains characters which we love and care for. To be fair this isn't something writers who populate their books with bees can escape - a beehive is bound to be populated with hundreds of bees who just fill their roles according to the role they play in its structure, leaving almost no room for any distinctive characteristics. Which is where Watership Down truly shines - who who has ever read the book is going to forget Fiver, Hazel, Big Wig or El-Ahrairah? Even though they are all rabbits and share similar traits, they're as different as moon is from the sun. We follow Flora pretty much because we have no other choice - there is no explanation as of why she is unique among other bees, and she's written as a special bee only because she's the protagonist.
Watership Down succeeded in creating animal characters which didn't read as humans with rabbit ears - something that The Bees struggles with. At one point the bees behave like ordinary bees - act collectively and think through the Hive Mind, etc - but in another situation they break into decisively human characteristics, such as cleaning dirt with brooms and dustpans. This is a cute and appealing image, but also one which is definitely human and was and put in the novel by its very human author - something which breaks the immersion of a reader in the story, reminding him that it was indeed written by someone and it's not really happening. Imagine Hazel from Watership Down stopping in the middle of his tracks to check a message on his iPhone.

I wasn't wooed by this book as I hoped I would be, but it doesn't mean that it's a terrible book. Far from it - there are moments of genuinely poetic and beautiful writing which truly illuminate the scenes they describe. But they're few and far between, stuck in more of the same tropes and ideas that we've read so often recently, and ends up simply being passable - a C in book grades. I won't discourage you from picking it up and seeing for yourself, but do not be blinded by the hype - you might end up disappointed and wishing that you've spent your time reading something else.