Yet Flora has talents that are not typical of her kin.

I found it a joy to read.” – Cathy Newman, Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2015 Judgeīorn into the lowest class of her society, Flora 717 is deemed fit only to clean her orchard hive. It has the allegorical power of Animal Farm, and the humanity of Tarka the Otter.

The Bees is about cults, the caste system, misogyny – even climate change. Flora is a humble sanitation worker bee who, by virtue of a special gift, manages to escape her lowly existence. Instead, it is a novel of great promise and innovation, hidebound by small yet crucial missteps.“This is a brilliantly inventive debut novel, set within a colony of bees. Had the action started closer to this middle section, The Bees might have been exactly that. In a succession of scenes of skill, intelligence and vitality, the publisher's hope of a Watership Down for the Hunger Games generation seems tantalisingly close. Paull's grasp of pace and character flies once Flora's mission to save the hive becomes clearer. It is frustratingly episodic - and at odds with the second half, which buzzes with purpose, suspense and energy. Unexpected changes of behaviour and unexplained accidents, such as Flora gaining entry to places she should not be allowed, stud the first half, buffeting Flora towards the correct narrative path. It's a confusing narrative tic, exacerbated by similar lapses in plotting and character. This wayward anthropomorphism continues throughout the first half of the novel: we are presented with a world which clearly has a solid grounding in entomological fact, except at odd times when bees open doors, eat in canteens, or adjust neckwear. For the most part, Paull's alien world of bees is made concrete and tangible it convinces - but then a sentence will crop up, a phrase and, like Reeve's coin, the imaginative spell is broken. Although the novel opens in a recognisably human world, the narrative swiftly turns to centre on Flora 717, a sanitation bee who, though programmed to 'accept, obey, serve', begins to confront the orthodoxy of the hive. This moment occurred to me too often as I read the opening chapters of Laline Paull's ambitious but erratic debut, The Bees. Reeve hypnotises himself back to 1912 and into Jane's initially standoffish arms, but as a method of time travel, self-hypnosis proves to be a flimsy vehicle: the appearance of a single coin from his time breaks the spell, bringing Reeve back to the real world.

The 1980 time-travel romance film Somewhere in Time stars Christopher Reeve as a theatre director who falls in love with the portrait of a long-dead Jane Seymour.

The bees by laline paull