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Episode image is a detail from a photo by Charles Adrian.
Talking bee-realism, female friendship and the intoxication of undeserved power and position, Charles Adrian revisits the three books he was given by guests at the end of the third season of the podcast.
Correction: Contrary to what Charles Adrian says in this episode, The Bees by Laline Paull is not really a Sparticus story. Flora 717 is, in effect, an enslaved bee but she does not exactly gather an army to revolt against her hive and nor is she defeated ultimately. You can read about what is known of Sparticus in Live Science here and about Cape honey bees (who, while more likely to be parasites than slaves, display traits similar to Flora 717) on Wikipedia here. It is also possible that there is no type of bee that is, in fact, known to enslave other types of bee in the way that ants do. You can read about enslaved ants and cuckoo bees on the OUP blog here.
Clarification: While Charles Adrian mentions radio waves as an example of damaging human intervention in the natural world, he is not a 5G truther; he is taking an example from the book (The Bees by Laline Paull) which may be based on contemporary research. You can read about a study into the effect of cell phone radiation on bee behaviour in the PMC here and about 5G truthers in The Atlantic here.
You can read about the waggle dance that foraging bees perform for other members of their colony on Wikipedia here.
Another book by Carol Shields, Larry’s Party, is discussed in Page One 7 and Page One 157.
You can read about The Hero’s Journey on Wikipedia here.
Also mentioned in this episode are Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes, The Prisoner Of Zenda by Anthony Hope and Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov; Pale Fire is discussed in Page One 119 and Page One 151.
You can read about the Schleswig-Holstein Question on Wikipedia here and in the Encyclopaedia Britannica here.
Books discussed here were previously discussed in Page One 104, Page One 105 and Page One 106.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 1st October, 2020.
Episode released: 27th October, 2020.
Book listing:
The Bees by Laline Paull (Page One 104)
Unless by Carol Shields (Page One 105)
Royal Flash by George Macdonald Fraser (Page One 106)
Links:
Enslaved ants and cuckoo bees on OUP blog
Effect of cell phone radiation on bees in the PMC
The Hero’s Journey on Wikipedia
Schleswig-Holstein Question on Wikipedia
Schelswig-Hostein Question in Encyclopaedia Britannica
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 184th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this is the 27th Page One In Review. Today is Thursday the 1st of October, 2020. So, once again: a pinch and a punch for the first of the month and no returns! You really need to get a little bit quicker at that if you want to beat me.
So this is... yeah, Page One In Review. In case you're new to the Page One podcast: Hello and welcome! Page One is a book podcast and these Page One In Review episodes are episodes in which I'm talking about all of the books that I've been given by guests on my podcast over the last eight years. We've reached the last three books that I was given during the third season of the podcast. So these episodes went out in October and November 2015 so pretty much exactly five years ago - or... yeah, more or less - when... you know, by the time this episode comes out.
What else did I want to say? In case you're interested and perhaps tracking - I don't know what kind of people you are - but in case you're tracking when I record these episodes, there is no plan at all. I don't have any set day when I record these. Generally I record them in the early afternoon because... yeah, morning is not a good time for me and later on in the afternoon there's more noise. Sometimes I record them late afternoon and you can probably hear the difference if you listen very, very carefully. I mean, there's always train noise but there's more people noise later in the afternoon. Anyway, the point is, I either... you know, so to give you a little bit of a sense of my process, I either wait for a moment when I think: “Yeah, today... yeah, this is the right day” or I force myself a little bit. Today I have forced myself a little bit. I hope it's not going to be noticeable in the quali... you know, in terms of the quality of the episode. I don't think... I mean, thinking about the quality of all of these Page One In Review episodes, I don't think it's going to make a huge amount of difference. But it w... it's interesting because last night I did think to myself: “Tomorrow. Tomorrow is going to be a good day for recording”. And I was... I was wrong. Well, perhaps not entirely wrong. But in any case I did have to force myself a little bit.
Right. Let's... Let's get on with it, shall we? During the 104th Page One...
[page turning]
Charles Adrian
... which was my conversation with Daniel Elliot - which I recorded here in my flat in West London - Daniel gave me a book called The Bees by Laline Paull and this is the book that for the last two episodes I've been talking about getting to. This is... yeah, I'm... I'm excited about this book. I'm excited about talking about this book. I... I was a bit dismissive when Daniel gave it to me and I think I laughed at him. I thought it was an absurd and ridiculous topic for a novel. It's the story of a bee called Flora. Flora... What's Flora's full name? Flora 717 I think. Yes:
Her kin was Flora and her number was 717…
it tells us on page 3.
I... yeah, I don't know. Perhaps because when I was about thirteen I remember being set an exam question in which we had to write from the point of view of an animal and - I think this is right - I think I wrote from the point of view of a dog and I was told that I would have got a better score if I had written it in the third person, that first person animal narratives are not very convincing. This is written in third person. So I think there's a... I think I just... There's a certain amount of resentment that Laline Paull got it right where I got it wrong.
But, yeah. So. Okay, I laughed at Daniel when he gave this to me but I really enjoyed it. It's a really gripping story. I mean, there's... the Guardian calls it “Frightening” - there's just a quote on the front here. It's just that one word. Margaret Atwood apparently called it “Gripping”. I like the idea that they called up Margaret Atwood and said: “What did you think of The Bees?” and she said: “Gripping” and put the phone down.
Yeah. So. Anyway. It's... Yeah, it is. It's gripping and frightening and a little bit gruesome and disgusting in places but also beautifully imagined. Laline Paull, I think, does a really good job of creating the world of the inside of the beehive. And she does it... It's... There's a slightly magic realist feeling to this novel but I think it's... it feels actually like an attempt at realism - bee realism if you like. She, I think, tries to really put her finger on what it would be like to inhabit the world as a bee with bee senses. And so there are things that are mysterious to this Flora because there's a ‘veil of scent’, for example. I think in the passage that I'm going to read for you today there might be mention of the ‘veil of scent’ and beyond that veil Flora can't know what is there. And perhaps that's how bees operate. I don't know.
I mean, lots of things happen to Flora. She's a very brave... She's a very plucky bee - I think ‘plucky’ is a better word than ‘brave’ in this case. There are attacks by wasps, there are mites that get in, there's... there's various... I think there's some kind of disease - brood... what's it called...? Foulbrood - which affects the nest. Flora - I don't... yeah, perhaps I shouldn't spoil this but it is... it's kind of wonderful and heartbreaking at the same time - she keeps having accidental babies and I... Yeah, fascinating. I didn't know that about bees that there are certain species of bees - types of bees - that can, you know, pass... parthenogener... parthenogenerate? I don't know if that's the word but anyway they can perform parthenogenesis. I didn't know that. I also didn't know that bees enslave other types of b... So some types of bees enslave other types of bees. Totally fascinating.
So this is... yeah, it's a story of one pers... It's a Spartacus story really. It's the story of a very lowly worker bee - she's supposed to work in sanitation in the hive - and she rises up and she... she doesn't... I mean, I suppose she doesn't quite overthrow the queen but she certainly... yeah, it's a... it's a story of triumph in the face of much adversity, some of which is caused by the, you know, normal natural processes of the natural world and some of which is caused by human... you know, the way that we manage to destroy the world around us through the use of pesticides and, you know, technology and so on. Radio waves.
Okay. What I wanted to read for you... So this is a... wait, shall I tell you? This is a Fourth... Fourth Estate...? Yeah, Fourth Estate book - it's very... they've got a very strange website address on the back - Fourth Estate edition of The Bees by Laline Paull and it is 344 pages long not including the acknowledgments. So I'm going to read you from pages 21, 22 and 23. Yeah, I would love to read you more - I want to continue reading for you - but I think that will be enough.
Like the other nurses, Flora's job was simple. She must give Flow to the babies as directed, rest when it stopped, then repeat. As Sister Teasle had stressed to Sister Sage, the feed timing was very strictly observed and marked with different bells that signalled one or other area of the nursery was due more, or must now stop feeding. These constantly chiming bells, and the shimmering energy of the fed larva, created an intense and dreamlike aura in the nursery, but one sound always alerted Flora's attention. It was the bright resonant tone of the sun bell, and its particular frequency told all the bees that beyond the safety of the hive walls, day had risen again.
Flora particularly enjoyed its vibration and listened out for its rare pleasure. Every three chimes, the supervising sisters came round and collected all the nurses whose fur had risen and whose Flow was dwindling, and replaced them with new ones, fresh from the Arrivals Hall, their fur still soft and damp.
Flora's fur had not changed, so she was kept on. By the sixth sun bell, every nurse around her had changed, but her own Flow continued as strongly as ever. Supervising sisters also changed, but there were always several Teasle in their number. As she watched them go about their business, Flora began to understand the workings of the Nursery.
The cribs were always being rotated. Each day the nurses who were soon to leave would clean out a thousand of them, then a small army of sanitation workers would arrive to remove the waste and scrub the floors. Surreptitiously, Flora watched them. Though they never made eye contact or said a word, she felt their vigorous energy. All the nurses were relieved when they left, none more so than Flora, ashamed of her own kin. Then the nurses would prepare the empty cribs in the newly cleaned area and the supervising sisters would say prayers of purification, before veiling the whole section with the shimmering scent of discretion, ready for the Royal Progress when the Queen laid her eggs.
When the next sun bell sounded, the glorious fragrance of new life rose in the Nursery and a thousand new eggs lay pure and perfect in their cribs. Every bee in the Nursery joined in songs of praise for Immortal Mother's fertility. It took three more sun bells for the eggs to hatch into larva babies, and then it was time to feed them Flow.
Under strictly timed supervision from a senior sister, for the next three days Flora and other feeding nurses watched in amazement as the babies grew before their eyes. Their sweet scent rippled with changes in their bodies, and then came the stark moment when the supervising sisters piped a quick whistle to stop the feeding. No matter how hungry a baby might be, not a single drop more might be given, for it was time to wean them in the Category Two ward.
To Flora, this was a highly desirable place to work. Through the big double doors that separated the two nursery wards, she had often glimpsed older nurses playing and singing with the bigger children, even cuddling them in their arms.
Everything about the Ceremony of Transition was exciting to Flora, from the way the babies started wriggling and laughing in excitement at the delicious food smells coming from the double doors dividing the wards, to the first strains of the cheerful hymns sung by the nurses who came for them. With graceful curtsies to all in the Category One Ward, even Flora, they scooped up the laughing babies and the doors closed soft behind them.
Okay, so, yeah, you have to... you have to look past a certain amount of anthropomorphic absurdism. And, yeah, it is a... it's a very interesting mix of things because it's not a cozy novel. That part sounds quite cozy, perhaps but I think even in there you can... you can hear some of the... the striations of that very harsh society that Laline Paull is drawing. And I guess it's [laughs]... yeah, I guess bee society is that striated, isn't it. It's that hierarchical. I mean... I mean, if you're a worker bee you're a worker bee, aren't you.
Yeah. I don't know if I've said this before on the podcast but I have such clear and excited memories of seeing bees do the waggle dance - or... I think it's called ‘the waggle dance’, isn't it - in a hive at the... at the Oxford Museum in Oxford. They have a hive that has a glass panel so you can see the bees arriving from when they... You know, when they've... they've been and they've found some flowers somewhere they come back to the hive and they dance to show the other bees where that... you know, where that... those flowers are. And the other bees really watch. You can see them - they crowd around and they watch. It's amazing. So, yeah, having seen that, I then find it more exciting to see bees visiting the flowers on my roof, you know, upstairs above where I'm standing now. Not so much now but earlier in the summer there were so many bees and I would think of them... some of them would have been honeybees and I would imagine them going back to their hives and doing the dance to describe, you know, where my... where my flat is. I think that's rather nice that there would be bees somewhere around who would know that my address was a good address for flowers.
Anyway. That's... So that's The Bees by Laline Paull. Yeah, lots of things going on there. I liked the book but I also love bees so I suppose it was an easy sell for me. Yeah. I recommend it.
[page turning]
Charles Adrian
Okay, the 105th Page One was my conversation with Tina Sederholm. Now, I recorded the 105th and the 106th Page Ones consecutively on the same evening because my guest for the 106th Page One was Neil Spokes who is Tina's husband. And they came together and brought their dog George, who I think you can hear in the background of those episodes. And Tina gave me Carol Shields' book Unless which Penny Perrick from the Sunday Times describes as “Her most raw and intentful novel yet”. I like the word ‘intentful’.
As far as I can remember this is the story of a woman whose daughter has decided to - her... I think her daughter is nineteen years old and, kind of, in the grip of that very black-and-white thinking that many teenagers are prone to... I was one of those I think - has gone out... her daughter has gone out into the street with a sign saying “Goodness” and she just sits on the street with that sign in front of her. And so I think it's a story of, kind of, yeah, generations and the different way different generations - or people of different ages, let's say - see the world. And then there's also that mother-daughter thing which can be so tricky according to some of my friends.
Anyway. So that's... Yeah, that's about as much as I remember about this novel. This woman has a daughter who is sitting in the street and I think she finds that quite difficult. So the daughter is called Nora but what is the mother called? Don't remember. She is a writer anyway so perhaps this is quite a personal book for Carol Shields. Who knows. I don't know what family Carol Shields had.
I'm going to read you a little bit from pages 119, 120 and 121 about... it's about female friendship and it's about, yeah, these four women who meet up and I think there's some quite nice stuff inside this:
The four of us have been meeting like this for ten years now. We order cappuccinos; three out of four of us ask for decaf. Once in a while we order a scone or a croissant.
We don't have a name; we're not a club; there's no agenda. We prefer not to think of ourselves as holders of opinions, that is, we do not “hold forth” on our opinions, because such opinions are arbitrary and manufactured in an unreal world with only fifty percent participation. We know almost everything there is to know about each other. We talk about all kinds of topics, although we don't talk about our sex lives - I think we avoid this subject out of a very old taboo, the need to protect others. Nor do we do much cooing over children because of Annette, who doesn't have any. If Annette happens to be travelling, as she sometimes does, Sally, Lynn, and I get in our kid stuff then. Sometimes we drop in gender discoveries: the fact that men like wind but women don't very much, they find it worrying. The observation that men won't, if they can help it, sit in the middle seat of a sofa, but women don't seem to care. In France it's thought that menstruating women are incapable of making a good mayonnaise. No! Surely, not anymore. We discuss the public library crisis, since both Annette and I sit on the board. Has our old friend Gwen, now Gwendolyn Reidman, always been a lesbian or is this a discovery of her middle age? And will Cheryl Patterson, the librarian, marry Sam Sondhi, the dentist out at the mall? Art is a courtship device, Annette says, at least poetry is. We wonder if the innocence we are born with is real, and to try to imagine a case in which it isn't destined to be obliterated. What then?
Tom has asked me once or twice what it is we talk about on Tuesday mornings, but I just shake my head. It's too rich to describe, and too uneven. Chit-chat, some people call it. We talk about our bodies, our vanities, our deepest [sic] desires. Of course the three of them know all about Nora being on the street; they comfort me and offer concern. A phase, Annette believes. A breakdown, thinks Sally. Lynn is certain the cause is physiological, glandular, hormonal. They all tell me that I must not take Norah's dereliction as a sign of my own failure as a mother, and this, though I haven't acknowledged it before, is a profound and always lurking fear. More than a fear - I believe it. They tell me it's all right to be angry with Nora for giving up, but I can't seem to find the energy for anger.
We know what we look like: four women in early middle age, hunched over a table in a small-town coffee shop, leaning forward, all of us, the way women do when they want to catch every word. Two years ago when I went to New York to receive the Offenden Prize, the three of them gave me a send-off gift of purple underpants in real silk. I wore these to the ceremony under my white wool suit, and all evening, every time I took a step this way or that, shaking hands and saying “Thank you for coming” and “Isn't this astonishing,” I felt the rub of silk between my legs, and thought how fortunate I was to have such fine, loving friends. Lynn, coming from Wales, calls underpants knickers, and now we all do. We love the sound of it.
I've been careful to give Alicia a few friends. It's curious how friends get left out of novels, but I can see how it happens. Blame it on Hemingway, blame it on Conrad, blame even Edith Wharton, but the modernist tradition has set the individual, the conflicted self, up against the world. Parents (loving or negligent) are admitted to fiction, and siblings (weak, envious, self-destructive) have a role. But the non-presence of friends is almost a convention - there seems no room for friends in a narrative already cluttered with event and the torturous vibrations of the inner person. Nevertheless, I like to sketch in a few friends, in the hope they will provide a release from a profound novelistic isolation that might otherwise ring hollow and smell suspicious.
I think that's an excellent point. Yeah, it's interesting... Tina, who gave this to me, was talking a few weeks ago about the shape of stories and, you know, finding shapes that aren't what's called ‘the hero's journey’ - I'll put a link to descriptions of ‘the hero's journey’ in the notes to this episode. But essentially ‘the hero's journey’ is your classic: hero goes out, has trouble doing something, manages to do it, comes home having learned something. I think it's probably more complex than that but that's [laughs]... that's all I can dredge up from my memory of reading about it. And there are... there are other ways of telling stories and Tina has become, I think, quite interested in that. And of course, yeah, the the presence of friends is often not necessary. It's not necessarily in ‘the hero's journey’: the hero is alone. So, yeah, I think that's... [musing] hmm... it's a... it's an interesting thing.
Also, I mean, I... yeah, I find it interesting to think about the different ways in which we view the world depending on how old we are. And of course some of how we view the world will depend on where we come from and the experiences we've had and the genes that we carry and the way that people relate to us and some of that won't change as we get older, but some of it is a function of our age and our experience, I think. I certainly am not the same person I was when I was nineteen so I identify more with the narrator of this novel than I do with Nora sitting on the street. And perhaps I was never Nora sitting on the street but I've... you know, I've known people who were. And I think... yeah, it seems to me that both voices are valuable.
Okay, that's Unless by Carol Shields. So, as I say, the 106th Page One was my conversation with Neil Spokes. So all these conversations that I'm talking about in this episode happened here in my flat. Probably all of them in the kitchen. I used to have conversations in the kitchen and, yeah, you would just... any fridge noises would be part of that. And, as I say, George noises in those episodes - George the dog.
[page turning]
Neil gave me Royal Flash by George MacDonald Fraser. I'd heard of the character of Flashman and these Flashman novels that George MacDonald Fraser wrote. Because the character Flashman is based on - or not ‘based on’ - he's taken from Tom Brown's School Days. Who wrote Tom Brown's School Days? I don't remember. I haven't read that. I think I saw an adaptation of it once on the... on TV. Flashman is the bully in Tom Brown's School Days and George MacDonald Fraser makes him into... yeah, he's a... he's the kind of guy who... he's... [laughing] he's a cad basically. He always lands on his feet. I think he's... he's entertaining. He knows himself fairly well, I think - he knows he's not a... you know, a hero. He's not a particularly moral guy. He's... yeah, he's the kind of guy I wouldn't particularly want to know but... Yeah, I think this book was enjoyable. I mean, it's written in the sixties and things very fortunately have changed.
This... This particular story - Royal Flash - is... is, kind of, about European history. You could see it that way. The Schleswig-Holstein question, which is a fascinating thing to look up. It led, I think, to the unification of Germany. It's all... I think that's all... what's his name? Yeah, Otto von Bismarck's Realpolitic. And so in this Flashman is... he's pretending to be, I think, the Duke of... where was it? The Duke of somewhere. Somewhere invented. In any case... because this book is... the story of this book, I think, is based largely on The Prisoner Of Zenda by Anthony Hope, which I... which is a title I reached for when talking about Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov with Tim Spooner during the 151st episode. I think Vladimir Nabokov plays with The Prisoner Of Zenda as well. I thought The Prisoner of Zenda was a twentieth century novel but it was, I think, in fact, a nineteenth century novel, which, again, I've heard an adaptation of on the radio but haven't read. It's a lot of fun, very silly. And this is also, I think, a lot of fun and very silly but occasionally properly offensive.
So I'm going to read you now from pages 154 and 155. It just describes Flashman's experience of impersonating a nobleman but there is one word that I'm going to censor in this reading. Okay.
Oh, I haven't told you. Sorry. This is a HarperCollins edition of Royal Flash and it is - well, let's say including the notes because I think they are a part of the the novel - 304 pages long. The notes, incidentally, give you the actual historical information that the novel is riffing off. The fiction - sorry, there's a kind of meta-fiction going on - because the fiction is that, I think, George MacDonald Fraser has found Flashman's papers and this is just a... he's just written up Flashman's own autobiography. So there's a... yeah, there's a, kind of, fact check in the back, I think.
Anyway, from pages 154 and 155:
There are ways of being drunk that have nothing to do with alcohol. For the next few days, apart from occasional moments of panic-stricken clarity, I was thoroughly intoxicated. To be a king - well, a prince - is magnificent; to be fawned at, and deferred to, and cheered, and adulated; to have every wish granted - no, not granted, but attended to immediately by people who obviously wish they had anticipated it; to be the centre of attention with everyone bending their backs and craning their necks and loving you to ecstasy - it is the most wonderful thing. Perhaps I'd had less of it than even ordinary folk, especially when I was younger, and so appreciated it more; anyway, while it lasted I fairly wallowed in it.
Of course, I'd had plenty of admiration when I came home from Afghanistan, but that was very different. Then they'd say [sic]: “There's the heroic Flashman, the bluff young lionheart who slaughters people [sic] and upholds old England's honour. Gad, look at those whiskers!” Which was splendid, but didn't suggest that I was more than human. But when you're royalty they treat you as though you're God; you begin to feel that you're of entirely different stuff from the rest of mankind; you don't walk, you float, above it all, with the mob beneath, toadying like fury.
I had my first taste of it the morning I left Tarlenheim, when I breakfasted with the Count and about forty of his crowd - goggling gentry and gushing females - before setting out. I was in excellent shape after bumping the chambermaid and having a good night's rest, and was fairly gracious to one and all - even to old Tarlenheim, who could have bored with the best of them in the St James clubs. He remarked that I looked much healthier this morning - the solicitous inquiries after my headache would have put a Royal Commission on the plague to shame - and encouraged, I suppose, by my geniality, began to tell me about what a hell of a bad harvest they'd had that year. German potatoes were a damnable condition, it seemed. However, I put up with him, and presently after much hand-kissing and bowing, and clanking of guardsmen about the driveway, I took my royal leave of them, and we bowled off by coach for the Strackenz border.
Okay, so there's a note - number 29 - after the sentence “German potatoes were in a damageable condition, it seemed” and note 29 tells us:
In 1847 Germany suffered its second successive failure of the potato crop. In the northern areas wheat had doubled its price in a few years.
There you go.
Okay, that's it for this episode of Page One In Review. I shall be back in the next episode with the first three books from the fourth season of the podcast. Enjoy yourselves, look after yourselves, find pleasure in small things and, yeah, speak to you soon. Bye.
Jingle
Thank you for listening to Page One. For more information about the podcast, please go to page one podcast.com.
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]