The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
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The Bee Sting
by Paul Murray
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2023
It’s been eight years since the Dublin novelist, Paul Murray, finished his last book. In that almost-decade, Murray has been busy crafting a family saga, The Bee Sting, a 640-page tragicomedy grappling with fate and disaster. Murray introduces the Barnes family, an old- money clan whose auto business is hemorrhaging cash. In five slightly experimental segments, Murray explores each character's life, searching for whatever brought this family such awfulness.
Cass Barnes is almost finished with High School, but recently things haven’t gone so well; she’s lashing out, blaming her dad for his economic failures, and frequenting bars with her best friend, Elaine. Cass starts stumbling into a sad future, feeling like “she had been buried under her parents’ lives, their failures, their unhappiness” (34). Does biology determine destiny? Are we doomed to repeat the lives of our parents? Would she be better off accepting this and getting drunk?
This is standard fare for any existential teenager, but these anxieties stretch throughout the entire family. As Cass is brought back from the brink of disaster, Murray introduces her younger brother— PJ, a red-haired middle-schooler confronted with Ears, a bully demanding €163 for a faulty car sold by PJ’s dad, Dickie. Desperately, PJ tries selling everything he owns, locked between desperation and the shame which keeps him from telling an adult. His life starts falling apart, “billowing...like black clouds of oil from a stricken tanker,” (one of Murray’s many parallels between natural and domestic disasters).
Fear looms from every corner and both Cass and PJ hide under masks of propriety and silence while trying to conceal their shame. Transparency and darkness make key motifs, interpolated throughout the novel. Biblical horrors (eg. flood and fire) act as exaggerated consequences, the kind a guilty brain might imagine, while vision and mirrors complete the network of visual imagery by reflecting each character’s guilt.
Then Imelda, PJ’s mother, enters the limelight. Her section’s a bit long and gets stuck in the past, curtailing the novel’s momentum. Commas and periods are omitted, suggesting that her life lacks order because of an unreconciled past. But the punctuation is so heavily implied, and I kept wanting something either more traditional or more fluid. Meanwhile, readers learn about Imelda’s youth, her “untouched beauty like a princess” and the “wolfish man” who tries to rape her, saved by Aunt Rose, a “healer” who disarms the offender with simple conversation. These details strike similar fairy-tale notes because Murray constantly adopts, for example, the biblical image, a witty piece of Irish folklore, and mythological allusions—even conspiracies—to furnish his narrative. The result is an evocation of our collective identity and the bonds that make us who are. Storytelling can liberate us, unshackling shame, tearing down walls, and freeing us from fate. But this family refuses to divulge their secrets, and because of that, they’re falling apart.
One secret is that Imelda was meant to marry Dickie’s brother, Frank, but Frank got into a car accident before their wedding and died. Things will never be the same; Imelda marries Dickie instead. Ghosts become a central motif, symbolizing how these characters haunt themselves— that Frank’s memory has become part of Imelda, invading her life and preventing closure. At one time or another, every family member wishes they could go back and change something in their past.
Instead of big reveals and dramatic set pieces, Murray allows his plot lines to fluctuate along soft curves while the narrative slithers back through itself, revealing new information. The story progresses and past explains present. After the narrative focus wanders from wife to husband, Murray completes his novel with “Age of Loneliness,” a codicil where different POVs alternate, sometimes several times a page—a maneuver facilitated, in part, by his use of the second-person, a choice encouraging empathy for the increasingly isolated Barneses, manipulating a reader’s sense of autonomy and reassessing the value of inter-connectedness.
If love can heal, it’s nothing compared with its ability to destroy, a theme that’s unavoidable in Murray’s novel; infidelity, assault, and voyeurism further a continuous meditation on free will and its revocation. Do we have autonomy? Is a loss of innocence woven through our genes and therefore ineluctable—or can we hold on to our youth? Aging, corruption, and theft course through The Bee Sting, limning a plot that blends family, disaster, and fate.
Murray’s narrative control is fully ripe, but the stylistic control is lacking. Vivid, microscopic details are often outmatched by overly-emotional brushwork. But on the whole, Murray’s story is impressively rife with tension. Disaster is always imminent, but the ominous might be eluded. Will it? As the novel closes, readers will wonder; plot lines deliberately lack climax and resolution. The lesson? That tragedy can exhaust us, but life continues.
Tyler Altman is an aspiring writer and student currently living in Boston.