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.
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