The Bee Sting (2023)
Why this one?
This is another one on the 2023 Booker Longlist, from which I’m cherrypicking a few books that grab my attention. This one was already on my TBR list, as I’ve followed Murray (like many others) since loving 2010’s Skippy Dies.
Paul Murray (1975- ; active 2003- ) was born in Dublin, Ireland, the son of a university professor and a teacher. He studied English Lit at Trinity College, Dublin, and later completed the well-regarded creative writing master's degree at UEA in Norfolk, England. His debut novel, 2003's An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Prize. 2010's Skippy Dies brought wider acclaim, a Booker longlist appearance and numerous other award nods including a Costa shortlisting. 2015's The Mark and the Void, which dealt with the financial crisis in Ireland, was joint winner of the Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction. Since then he has written a screenplay, for the 2018 Irish movie Metal Heart, directed by actor Hugh O'Conor.
Thoughts, etc.
The Bee Sting is something of an epic at 600+ pages, focusing on a fairly affluent family in small-town Ireland, in the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crash. It's a novel of perspectives, with its lengthy first four sections each seen through the eyes of a different family member.
It begins in a relatively light-hearted, almost superficial mode with the teenage turmoil of daughter Cass, fretting over status, relationships, friendships and her upcoming exams. Her family are irritants, background annoyances that get in the way of more important issues, mostly involving impressing her best friend Elaine. Next we hear from neglected 12-year-old PJ, alternately naive and incredibly knowledgeable, who takes us very much into the world of Skippy Dies, a lens that Murray seems most obviously to revel in. He's able to get himself into two fairly alarming dramas (one very present danger, and one looming in the background to be revisited later) without his family seeming to notice anything wrong whatsoever.
Mother Imelda is up next, with a section told in Molly Bloom-esque stream of consciousness. Like some other reviewers, I did wonder at the rationale for her being the only character given such a distinctively 'different' voice: Sexist? Likely not as Cass isn't given the same incumbrance. Classist? More possibly? But ultimately I think the intention is fairly innocuously playful - before we hear Imelda in her own voice we learn from Cass of her tendency to bounce hectically between topics, interrupting herself mid-sentence. She's also, though, very much the outsider here: the only one of the family not to have been born into upper middle-class affluence. In her section we learn about her troubled backstory, both as a child with her violent father and brothers and then notably her initial relationship with the sporting hero Jack and the circumstances that led to her instead marrying his rather less impressive brother Dickie, inheritor of their father's local garage and source of the family wealth.
Dickie's section is perhaps the most stunning of all, and one that I don't want to spoil too much. Safe to say that if we begin the novel thinking it's a little bit odd that a Trinity-educated chap should have wanted to give up his own path in life to seemingly 'look after' his late brother's bereaved fiancee, we learn in this section both why this made some sort of sense to Dickie and also the ultimate tragedy of it. The section focusing on Dickie's college years is another one in which Murray is absolutely in his element, a really immersive, impressive and utterly shocking tour de force.
The pace of storytelling accelerates towards the end of the novel, flicking ever more rapidly between characters, and introducing crisis after crisis to the point where it starts to feel a little overloaded. There are so many ideas and plot threads introduced that it feels like some of them are under-served and occasionally a little purposeless. The conclusion is probably the least satisfying aspect of the novel for me, as gripping as it is.
In some senses, though, that's only because the main bulk of the novel has been so confidently satisfying. The perspective-switching narrative, at the slow pace of the early sections, is briliantly deployed here. It's not just a clever trick to keep readers interested, though it absolutely is that as well. You spend long sections of the novel desperately keen to find out what's going on with the other characters (notably PJ's story, which is left hanging for what seems like more than half of the novel!) More than this though, it seems designed to communicate something very deep in and of itself: the sense that even within a seemingly tight-knit family unit, nobody has any real idea of what's going on with those around them. The novel seems really focused on the idea of our self-absorption and lack of empathy for others, foregrounding our personal issues at the expense of what likely really matters. Each character absolutely has genuine major challenges to face, but for each of them their own problems are all-consuming, to the point where their family members become background characters in their lives and are able to live almost entirely unnoticed ‘other’ lives, and face problems alone that should be shared. It's probably not for nothing that a key retreat in the novel for many characters is a so-called 'bunker'. Its conclusion (in darkly comic, over the top fashion) shows how mutually destructive this approach to life is.
Where this gets really interesting for me is in something else that's bubbling along as an ever-present background factor in the novel, which is the climate crisis. Impossibly bigger than all of the other crises (including the financial one - ultimately a red herring in the story for reasons I won't go into here) in the novel, it's like a blinding light that the novel's protagonists are unable to look at (with the exception of PJ, who has to balance child-like wonder at the scientific marvels of the world with the terror that comes with his comprehension of its present fate.) The novel's ultimate example of self-absorbed behaviour is the one that means that almost all of its characters are blind not only to their collective destruction on a micro/familial level but also the much bigger macro trauma that's ever-present in the background of this page-turning yet thought-provoking novel.
Score
8.5
Another really strong book, and one of the more pound-for-pound enjoyable Booker reads I’ve come across. It’s another one with massive contemporary relevance on multiple levels, and therefore despite its partly comic tone being at odds with ‘typical’ prizewinners, I still feel like it’s in with a decent shot. It falls slightly short of perfection for me as it doesn’t quite deliver in its later chapters on its own grand ambition, but I would absolutely recommend it to anyone, regardless.
Next up
I seem to have inadvertently developed a thing for blokes named Paul, since next on my list is Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, making him the third Paul in a row after Messrs. Harding and Murray. Why so many Pauls, Booker judges? Weird move.
