THE AUGUST SELECTION of our book club. I was not expecting to enjoy it much, but it turned out to be likable enough. It put me in mind of the praise Samuel Johnson bestowed on Pope's Rape of the Lock, that "new things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new."
The main story of The Bees is the familiar archetype of the coming of age and mature accomplishments of a society's hero/savior: obscure birth, precocious achievement, early mentors, struggles for recognition, contending with envious rivals, journey or exile, dangerous encounters, temptations, eventual return and triumph, death. Very Hero with a Thousand Faces, we might say.
This storyline is made new in part by making the hero female, but the major twist is that the protagonist is a bee.
Flora 707 is hatched a lowly janitorial bee, but soon shows an astonishing range of talents, eventually mastering nearly every task in the hive and successfully navigating its ruthless class hierarchy. She may carry an interloping genetic strain--there are glancing references to bees from more southerly climes--but more importantly she is a Lean In kind of bee, ready to take on invading wasps, unfamiliar foraging territory, and even such absolutely prohibited acts as laying eggs (only the queen may lay eggs).
By the end of the novel, the aging queen is near death, the hive crumbling...who will take the swarm into the challenges of the future?
Not Flora 707, actually, as things turns out, though she plays a crucial pivotal role.
I have no idea how closely based any of the novel is on the actual lives of bees. But the newness of the setting made the familiar coming-of-the-savior story a lot more engaging than it might have been. The Bees would make a dandy graphic novel, I think.
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