The Bee Sting by Paul Murray book review
Two decades ago, the Irish writer Paul Murray started his career by publishing “An Evening of Long Goodbyes,” a book that has remained one of this century’s greatest comedies. With this month’s publication of “The Bee Sting,” Murray has written a book that could remain one of its greatest novels.
He was hardly sitting still between these two triumphs. In 2010, “Skippy Dies” was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and in 2016, “The Mark and the Void” was joint winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, a British award for comic literature.
Admittedly, even that record of success might not be enough to draw American readers to Murray’s new 650-page epic, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize on Aug. 1. But anyone who starts “The Bee Sting” will be immediately absorbed by this extraordinary story about the derailing of a once-prosperous family. Although Murray is a fantastically witty writer, his empathy with these characters is so deep that he can convey the comedy of their foibles without the condescending bitterness of satire. His command of their lives is so detailed that he can strip away every pretense and lie without spoiling a surprise. And, most impressive, while sinking into the peculiar flaws of this one uniquely troubled family, Murray captures the anxiety many of us feel living on the edge of economic ruin in these latter days of the Anthropocene Epoch.
In the small Irish town where “The Bee Sting” unfolds, Dickie and Imelda Barnes are a prominent couple. Dickie runs a car dealership owned by his retired father, and his wife, Imelda, is a legendary beauty. But as the novel opens, the pretty facade of their lives has started to crack. In good times, it didn’t matter much that Dickie was not a natural manager, more likely to be reading a book than pushing a sale. Since the financial crisis, though, the car business has been in something of a slowdown, which “quickly became more of a freefall.”
Advertisement
Raised in unspeakable squalor that she is determined never to think of or — God forbid — return to, Imelda regards Dickie’s financial challenges with rising panic. Selling off their furniture online may buy them a few more weeks, but she insists that their emergency would be solved if Dickie would just call his father living it up in Portugal and ask for more money.
Dickie’s dealership is certainly suffering along with the general economy, but its challenges and his are exacerbated by decisions he cannot admit to anyone. Even the nature of his marriage is more fraught than he’s willing to confess. And for all her hard-boiled advice about coming clean, Imelda carries her own secrets, which include that legendary bee that got caught under her veil on her wedding day.
The people most immediately affected by Dickie and Imelda’s flailing efforts to stay afloat are their two sensitive children. Teenage Cass is desperate to win the approval of her toxic best friend and escape with her to Trinity College in Dublin. Meanwhile, her 12-year-old brother, PJ, is fascinated by the wonders of natural science. Both kids spark with unpredictable charms and irritations, insights and misunderstandings. And as Murray did with such hilarious success in “Skippy Dies,” he once again creates that weird amalgam of despair and resilience that defines modern adolescence.
Advertisement
While PJ’s parents fiddle around the edges of their disastrous lives, they don’t notice that their precocious son is being seduced by an ominous character online. “Haven’t the last two years been a slow, methodical undoing of everything he ever thought was true?” Murray writes. “The trouble is coming from inside; from his family. And unless something happens to stop it, it will keep billowing out, worse and worse, like black clouds of oil from a stricken tanker, till everything is coated in it, suffocating from it.”
The great miracle of “The Bee Sting” is the way Murray propels this story forward while simultaneously looping back into the past. Everything that happens feels both spontaneous to the moment and yet determined by a web of tragedies and deceptions that stretches back for decades. Every established fact unspools to greater complexity — not like a mystery being solved but like a labyrinth being constructed. For writers, it’s a master class in the art of narrative; for the rest of us, it’s a demonstration of how ferociously we polish the rusty surface of our lives.
As Murray slips through time, moving section by section from the mind of one family member to the next, the revelations gather like thunderstorms — easy to discount, then ominous, finally worse than expected. Indeed, all these characters are perplexed by the chaotic interaction of will and chance. “Life at that time was like walking on a path made of spinning tops,” Imelda thinks. “Every moment was the moment when everything changed.” There’s such profound insight here into the way panicked grief and repressed desire motivate people to attempt to redirect their lives. In the wake of one of the novel’s many astonishing moments, Dickie tells his parents, “I’m changing the truth.” And yet, for all this calamitous drama spread over years and hundreds of pages, “The Bee Sting” never fails to dazzle with its colliding coincidences, the great sprawling randomness of life all somehow brought to glamorously choreographed climaxes.
Advertisement
This is also, among its many qualities, a strikingly sophisticated novel about climate change. That’s not to say it’s a story that tries to convince us of the gathering scientific evidence or to frighten us with dismal visions of our future — neither, at this point, a particularly original tactic. Instead, Murray explores what it’s like to maintain the trappings of Western opulence at the inflection point of our planet’s health, to carry on with the masquerade of domestic life while harboring the knowledge that everything’s cooked. For some of these characters, that’s a terrifying prospect, of course, but for others, already broiling in the crucible of their own shame, a future sterilized by cataclysm is weirdly attractive.
Considering the impressive length of “The Bee Sting,” it’s remarkable to witness its sentence-by-sentence elegance. Every paragraph is marked by Murray’s stylistic brilliance — and daring. Indeed, if you’re still grumpy about the way some modern writers eschew quotation marks, brace yourself: A significant chunk of “The Bee Sting” contains no punctuation at all. Yes, that’s irritating for a time, but if you persist, these pages will quickly teach you how to read them. Murray’s voice is so insistent, his fidelity to the natural patterns of the language so instinctual that omitting punctuation feels like just a minor concession for greater speed, like Olympic swimmers shaving their legs.
Given the scope and tone of “The Bee Sting,” with its encyclopedic knowledge of economic cycles, football matches, gay bars, apocalyptic bunkers, college life, car dealerships — everything — comparisons to Jonathan Franzen are inevitable. But Murray’s novel wears its information gracefully. You can read “The Bee Sting” without having, for instance, to sit through a lecture on birds. And although, like Franzen, Murray is essentially interested in the moral conflicts of our lives, he handles his characters and their failings with heartbreaking tenderness.
“Unbearable,” Imelda thinks. “What an unbearable thing is a life.” But what a solace is a novel like this.
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.
The Bee Sting
By Paul Murray
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 645 pp. $30
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK%2Bwu8qsZmtoYmh8cYSOa2lompWaerTAyKeeZpqfpLimvoypqaKylWK5sLrGpaCsrF2nsre1xLBm