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A review by nwhyte
The Life of the Bee by Maurice Maeterlinck
4.0
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2872453.html
It's quite short, and it's basically about bees. Maeterlinck was a keen bee-keeper, he knew what he was writing about (in this case at least - a later book about termites was allegedly plagiarized), and his enthusiasm is infectious. As the quote above demonstrates, it's a detailed, lyrical and rather passionate work, if somewhat anthropomorphic.
The downside is that, like a lot of nature writing of the time (the book was first published in 1901), it is a rather politically conservative text. There is no room here for departure form the natural order; although queens may be overthrown and replaced, this happens only as part of the set natural cycle of returning to the status quo. Bees manifest the importance of knowing your place and sticking to it. I was irresistibly reminded of Laline Paul's The Bees, one of the first books I read for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, which turns exactly the same setting into a revolutionary parable.
It's quite short, and it's basically about bees. Maeterlinck was a keen bee-keeper, he knew what he was writing about (in this case at least - a later book about termites was allegedly plagiarized), and his enthusiasm is infectious. As the quote above demonstrates, it's a detailed, lyrical and rather passionate work, if somewhat anthropomorphic.
The downside is that, like a lot of nature writing of the time (the book was first published in 1901), it is a rather politically conservative text. There is no room here for departure form the natural order; although queens may be overthrown and replaced, this happens only as part of the set natural cycle of returning to the status quo. Bees manifest the importance of knowing your place and sticking to it. I was irresistibly reminded of Laline Paul's The Bees, one of the first books I read for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, which turns exactly the same setting into a revolutionary parable.