The Bee Sting
by Paul Murray
In his tragicomic fourth novel, Paul Murray unravels a small-town Irish family in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash.
“The rain is falling again in soft sheets and the sun through it makes the pitch glitter like broken glass”
The Barnes family is in a spot of bother. It’s 2008, and their car dealership, run by Dickie Barnes, is buckling under the coming financial crash. Nobody in town is buying cars, and those who already own one have stopped bringing it to the Barnes garage for a service. Dickie seems oddly resigned. He’s no salesman. A soft fellow; after his daughter learned about climate change at school and told him about it, he pretty much started talking customers out of buying petrol cars.
His wife Imelda, the town beauty, grew up poor with an abusive father and married into the well-off Barnes family almost by accident. Here, she tries to take matters in her own hands. Compared to Dickie she’s a bolt of lightning, always zapping forward. She keeps up the family’s appearances for a visit from Dickie’s father, Maurice, flying back to Ireland from Portugal, where he retired to enjoy his golf and his sunshine. He’ll get them back on track. In the meantime she sells her clothes on eBay to bring in some cash.
Their teenage daughter, Cass, a teenager on the verge of heading off to university, isn’t coping all too well. The garage’s troubles are the talk of the town, and it’s not a good look when your father is mucking it up for everyone to see. The goss! On top of it all there’s Elaine, her manipulative best friend since forever. They must go to college together. They must stay together. It’s a lot, and Cass starts having a drink, and another one, and then another.
Their son PJ is a pretty lonely kid. No one seems to really notice him. He’s being bullied, needs to come up with some money to pay off a debt to the town bully, who claims Dickie ripped off his father, and wants PJ to settle it. Besides Nev and Zargham, he has a friend who lives in Dublin, and they talk online. He might visit him soon. It’s a few hours from the country. He’s working on an escape plan.
He also wears shoes that are a few sizes too small; his feet have outgrown them, but he won’t tell his mam. Save the family some money.
Around them are Victor, Dickie’s cross-eyed, doomsday-prepping mate, whom Imelda can’t stand to see the sight of. And Maurice, of course, who can do no wrong. Known and hailed by everyone in town (“From the other side of the street Georgie Moran hollers out There’s the man! Howya Maurice!”). And Frank, Dickie’s brother, whose presence looms over the entire family.
Murray gives each character their own chapters, alternating between their present day and the formative events that took place a few decades earlier. Bringing out in great detail their personalities and their histories, he reveals the layers of this dysfunctional family from their point of view—what drives them, the secrets they keep, what haunts them.
The writing is very clever. Making use of the space between his characters, of the things they don’t know about each other, Murray expertly hides narrative twists that left me with a knot in my stomach. His writing is heartbreaking when he tumbles his characters into trouble, and hilarious when he chronicles small-town life and a fumbling family (“You don’t have to tell me EVERY SINGLE DETAIL of your life Cass’s voice returns from beneath the duvet”).
From the first pages it’s clear that you’re about to witness the Barnes’s unraveling, but despite its tragedy, it’s funny, too. The book runs to over 600 pages, and I still raced through it.
Take the moment Cass, on a drive with Imelda, says she wants to study English literature in Dublin, where her father went:
“The windows of the Camry are down too but somehow it only becomes hotter Imelda’s fingers are sticking to the steering wheel It just seems a long way to go to read a few poems she says”
Or years earlier, when a young Imelda tried to wrap her head around the football:
“Now Imelda didn’t know one end of a ball from the other and until then she’d have imagined how obsessed an entire town could be about kids playing football Wherever you went you heard the same conversation Would Joe Blah’s knee hold up Did Seanie Whatshisface deserve another crack at a starting place Had they a chance of making it to the next round”
You’ll have noticed the missing punctuation. It threw me off at first, too, and makes for a more demanding read. Murray uses it in Imelda’s chapters, I think to capture the rush of her inner thoughts. At first it bothered me, but after a while it engulfed me. When I closed the book and looked at the passages I’d noted down, nearly all of them came from her chapters:
“The bloody roads were clogged up the whole way and Daddy was in a jock Kept honking the horn at the unmoving cars then complaining about his headache STOP HONKING THE HORN THEN she yelled at him but he didn’t hear Her own head was full of chaos”
That breathlessness carries the book. As the family’s points of views start to converge, the gaps Murray has left between his characters narrow, and the tension tightens page by page.
Weaving past and present, personal and family history, Paul Murray has pieced together a layered, technically impressive and thoroughly engrossing novel. It’s the perfect beach read, or an autumn companion to sink your teeth into.
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
Published by Hamish Hamilton in 2023
