This is by Paul Murray. It was first published in 2023, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize that same year (Paul Lynch's Prophet Song won).

I finished reading The Bee Sting while we were still in Kuching. Last year, then... And it's now March. It's a hefty book (638 pages in the print edition). But it wasn't length that delayed the post. Rather, I found the book so powerful that I needed a block of time to process it, and write about it. And such blocks of time have not been plentiful of late...

So... I'm going to do this post in stages. First, I'll note the elements that have stayed with me all these weeks later. Second, I'll discuss what struck me after I'd briefly skimmed through the text again. Third, I'll round off with some comments that interested me.



***

But before any of that, briefly, the characters. We're in Ireland, just as the 2008 Global Financial Crisis has really started to bite, and we're peering into the lives of the Barnes family.

Dickie's car dealership is suffering from the cold winds of recession, but even before that blow, he's a man who is struggling. His university career was interrupted when his charismatic brother died, and he went home to take over the business; simultaneously, the homosexuality he had just started to accept as part of himself is forced down to a subconscious level when he starts a relationship with his late brother's grieving fiancee, Imelda. When Dickie's true sexuality comes to the fore again, he leaves himself open to the nastiest of blackmailers. Meanwhile, environmental concerns have given him a prepper mentality, and he joins with a mate to set up a kind of survivalist base in some adjoining woods that he owns.

Imelda is a sad case, too. Initially we're seeing her through her hypercritical daughter's eyes, and it's hard not to take on the narrator's impatience. Imelda is still beautiful, and we definitely get the impression she lost her way somewhere, but now she just comes across as very superficial, primarily concerned about keeping up appearances in face of economic decline. It's when we hear her own voice that we start to feel for her. A product of domestic violence and maternal disparagement, and acutely aware that this rebound marriage -- into which she pretty much sleepwalked -- might have been a mistake, she's nevertheless a battler. She wants to do the right thing, even though everything about her life could have made her into a much worse person. Of all the characters, she is perhaps the most psychologically interesting. What an unbearable thing is a life, she thinks at one point...

Cass is in her last year of secondary school. We start out fairly impatient with her, too. She despises her parents, goes in for demeaning crushes on friends and teachers, and discovers men and alcohol just when she's supposed to be preparing for the exams that will get her to university. But then, it's not easy for young people... Underneath all that, she thinks quite deeply about things, and has a real literary talent. Plus it's her concern for the environment that has left such a mark on her father.

PJ is Cass's 12-year-old brother. And you feel for him right from the start. Quiet, anxious, bullied, he's the kid you just want to wave a magic wand over, so that things come right. He's also the kid who's wide open to exploitation via the internet (a vulnerability that gives rise to one of the book's most terrifying scenes).

They're the four main characters. Additionally, we have:

-- Victor, Dickie's friend. A headcase, says Mam; he has a good heart, says Dickie; PJ is impressed by all the stuff he knows. At any rate, he's VERY into the survivalist thing, and throws himself vigorously into the construction of a survival shelter in the Barnes's woods. He also has quite a talent for summing situations up.

-- Then there's Frank, Dickie's dead brother, and Imelda's first fiance. Initially VERY mysterious, but bit by bit details start to emerge.

-- Aunt Rose is now very old, her faculties declining. She used to be a fortune teller, says Imelda. And she does indeed catch glimpses of the future. The question is whether she just sees it, or whether it's her seeing it that makes it happen...

***

1.
The impressions that lingered

-- It's a novel about family disintegration. About experiences that haunt us. About our incapacity to talk about things. About the way couples drift apart, and children learn to despise their parents. Both these latter processes are exacerbated by financial distress, of which there was plenty in the Ireland that Murray describes.


"It’s a beautiful day, the sunlight so strong that even when he enters the woods it’s almost blinding..." Actually, these are Australian woods. In 2009, to help stimulate the crisis-stricken economy, the government gave us all money. We spent ours on a trip to Mallacoota

-- It's a novel about suppressed sexuality. I read it not long after finishing The Line of Beauty, where one key character is still languishing in the closet, and societal acceptance of same-sex relationships is still patchy. What endless misery has been caused by the enthronement of heterosexual norms...

-- I also read The Bee Sting at roughly the same time I was reading David Szalay's Flesh. Is it possible for two similarly themed books to be SO different? They both shine a light on pivotal male characters; more generally, they're both to some degree about the experience of being male. And yet Szalay's style is spare, trimmed to the bone; Murray's is expansive, and often humorous. Szalay's book left me sad; Murray's left me gutted.

-- Maybe I'm out of line here, but I couldn't help feeling it was a pity that the really nasty character -- the one whose nefarious activities at Dickie's garage lead to the threats that make PJ's life a misery, and who tries with varying degrees of success to exercise sexual power over the other members of the Barnes family -- is Polish. His tattoos speak of right-wing sympathies, and his predation goes beyond the Barnes family. I know baddies have got to be from somewhere, and I know there's a big population of Poles in Ireland, so statistically... But I wondered about picking a nationality that already gets flak on a number of levels in English-speaking environments.

-- The brilliance of the novel's reveals is extraordinary. The narrative slowly strips back layer after layer of pretence. Even the title turns out to be a lie...

-- The way the four characters get to relate their own sections is masterful. Each has a very different voice, and as the book barrels towards its conclusion, the narrative switches to second person, with the sections getting shorter, and the changeovers faster. It's cinema on a page. You can NOT put it down at this point.

-- I coped with the lack of inverted commas (not without an eyeroll...) HOWEVER, the lack of full stops in Imelda's sections I found really irritating...

-- In part, this is another apocalyptic novel, coming hard on the heels of The Road (Cormac McCarthy), and coexisting in my reading life with Parable of the Sower (Octavia E. Butler) and The Memory Police (Yoko Ogawa). All these books show us different stages of environmental destruction. In Ogawa's, daily life still kind of functions, despite the repression of society and the destruction of nature; in Butler's, things are already really bad, and anarchy rules; in McCarthy's the earth is a desert. Murray's reveals our largely insouciant present, and shows us people who much more foresighted (although we might take issue with their strategies). It's strange how reading themes coalesce without any conscious planning on our part...

-- The ending... That shocking, shattering ending... I sat up late finishing this book, and I sat up even later looking up people's interpretations of the ending... Surely not...? Surely not...? Readers are desperate for an interpretation that is not gut-wrenchingly tragic. But Murray's own words are pretty convincing. Look at the book's first sentence, he says...



***

2.
The impressions that emerged from a second skim

Going back to the text, I was reminded how incredibly well Murray foreshadows things. At regular intervals, for example, and from different people, we have the high-chiming note of self-acceptance and honesty.

Here's Miss Grehan, Cass's English teacher, talking about the tragic end of Sylvia Plath: "We’re all that kind of person... We all have problems. But often instead of accepting the truth about ourselves, we cover it up. We try to make ourselves the way we think we're expected to be. So many of the bad things that happen in the world come from people pretending to be something they’re not."

Yes... This could be the motto of the book.

And later, Frank and Dickie's mother, talking to Imelda: "You see Dickie still wants to be the boy that everyone likes He wants to be a local hero like his brother was Stepping up Saving the day But that is not who he is And I fear he will end up making himself and the people around him very unhappy"

And the doctor, when Dickie falls into depression just as Imelda is expecting Cass: "The past remains with us, in all kinds of unexpected ways. If we haven’t made peace with it, it will come back again and again."

And Willie, Dickie's university friend and lover: "I suppose that’s what everybody wants, isn’t it. To be like everybody else. But nobody is like everybody else. That’s the one thing we have in common. We’re all different, but we all think everyone else is the same, he said. If they taught us that in school, I feel like the world would be a much happier place."

Exactly so.


"The mantelpiece was covered with pictures of the family through the years"

*

It was a good idea to begin with the children's narratives. They're so frustrated and/or angsty with regard to their parents. Then, as the narratives succeed each other, you learn why...

*

Richard/Ryszard, the bad guy... Very much a gothic character. There's this great exchange, which illustrates Murray's telling but laconic style:

Up close, the man was not so much handsome as beautiful, like a girl might be, with fine, white bones from which his black eyes peered as if through spyholes in a painting in a haunted house...
Cass went to rejoin Rowan. Who’s that guy? he wanted to know.
Some randomer. He’s trying to find a job.
He looks like a vampire from the 1980s.
He’s from Poland.
Oh right.

Ryszard is creepily interested in the murder that took place not long ago in the neighbourhood. You start to suspect he's some sort of incarnation of evil, a devil character, who pokes and prods and tempts until he finds the weak spot he can really make use of.

Cass and her friend remain largely immune to his manipulation. They find too much to laugh at to be beguiled by him. Imelda is tempted by him, vaguely attracted by his looks and his boldness. He reminds her of a cat: "So black it looked like a hole in the universe A gorgeous cat-shaped black hole with glowing green eyes... But... she knew well that someone that pretty has their eye out for one person Themselves Especially if it's a man..." It's Dickie who turns out to be the one whose vulnerability Ryszard proves spectacularly able to exploit.

*

Second time round, you also notice more than ever all the places where events could have taken a different turn...

"How did it come to this?" Dickie wonders towards the end of the novel. "You look back at the past and you can’t tell where exactly you went wrong. Was it a single misstep? When you reached for Ryszard in the empty garage? The night in your musty Rooms when you told Frank to do the honourable thing [by marrying Imelda]? Or is it everything? Your years raising a family, running a business, your little loves, your thwarted desires, your whole innocuous life, has it all been leading up to this moment? And if it has, what does that make you?"

Conversely, Murray "saves" several characters from minor trauma on the way through. You're waiting for Cass to fail her exams (because she has behaved so stupidly in the run-up to them). She doesn't. Poor PJ is snatched from perdition a couple of times. But there's no helping anyone at the end...


"It’s going to be a well he says For when the floods come and there’s no water
"How would there be floods and no water she says
"I don’t know that’s what Dad said"

*

The uncanny elements of the story stood out in even sharper relief on my second pass. Here, for example -- and worth quoting at length -- are the minutes before the family finds out about Frank's death:

Three weeks later she started awake in her bed with a terror inside her like she couldn’t believe Not just the usual that came with the coke no it was like something had taken possession of her or was stuck inside her like a freezing skeleton someone else’s skeleton inside her and it was scrabbling and going mad trying to get out while she herself could hardly move In a panic she reached for her phone and she called him in case he might be awake and when he didn’t answer she went out to the yard in her bare feet to see could she see him
And there was the mist
It rose in a wall around her and grew thicker as the sky paled Clinging to her in cold skeins Wrapping itself round her like a dress A wedding dress that stretched off in every direction to cover the whole world
And she stood unshod and she stared into it And Rose came out of the cottage and stood beside her on the walk
And they both waited there as the grey mist swallowed up everything around them
And then from inside the phone began to ring...

Even at her own wedding, Imelda is like a ghost:

She was the one Rose had seen in her vision She was the ghost
A leftover from another life A remnant of something that was no more That was her Haunting the feast

But it's Frank who really haunts the novel. The brother Dickie envies, and can never compete with; the brother whose death Dickie thinks was his fault, and ruins his life trying to make amends for: "Being your brother's ghost! What a way to live your life." And Frank is the fiance whose memory is so much part of Imelda that she somehow expects him to be there at her wedding, waiting for her to marry him...

But, of course, it's not Frank at the wedding. It's Dickie. He's the one who experiences her shock, as she stares at him, not really knowing who he is. Imelda recalls the aftermath, when Dickie comes to find her: "He was the first thing you’d seen clearly in a while in fact And as he sat there you could see that he was a ghost too That Frank had gone and left him here like you Life done but still wandering the earth... What solace has a ghost for another ghost..." It's the unborn Cass who has to summon them back to the present moment.

PJ has a perceptive take on this whole revenant business: "Here’s something you’ve been thinking about lately: when things come back, very often they come back different, like they come back weird or wrong."


"You were doing it in Geography about how oil is formed from tiny sea creatures from 150 million years ago, like plankton that were swimming around during the Jurassic, so in a way it’s the total Pet Sematary thing of at first you pull it out of the ground and think Fantastic this solves all my problems but then after a while everyone realizes whoa, wait a sec, this miracle substance is actually annihilating the entire planet, which obviously the original plankton wouldn’t have tried to do anything like that before someone decided to resurrect them"

That's what happens in The Bee Sting, says Katy Waldman: "Again and again, details 'come back different,' reframed or reanimated by another perspective, and their repetition adds to the sense of spookiness, as if the book itself were haunted."

*

There's an interesting little throwback to the events portrayed in Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These. Again, we see the danger of consigning things to corrosive silence:

"People TOLD each other they didn’t like to talk about the murder; then they went on to talk about it at length. But there were other things that they didn’t talk about not talking about, that were simply never, ever mentioned. The laundry, for instance, right in the middle of the town. It had been part of the convent; for sixty years, girls who’d ‘gone astray’ were sent there, to safeguard the town from their dangerous ways. Sometimes they never came out again; they spent their lives behind the high grey walls, washing the bedlinen of the priests and the nuns, as punishment for their long-ago sins. They were all dead now. The convent was closed, and the laundry, and nobody talked about what had happened in there."


Beehive huts, Dingle Peninsula

***

The apocalyptic elements emerge particularly from the consciousness of Victor -- who's possibly a nutcase, but is certainly a very prescient one:

"Victor turns to them both, swollen muscles pushing through his mud-spattered shirt. People aren’t stupid, he says. They can see what’s coming. But they’re too scared to do anything about it. Instead all they can think is to pretend it’s not happening. Keep going, like everything’s normal. Pour on more fuel, to show there’s no fire. But the day will come when they won’t be able to deny it any longer. They’ll go to the supermarket and find the shelves are empty. They’ll turn on the TV to get the news, but there won’t be any news. No more power, no more internet, no more water when they turn on the tap. All that stuff is gone, it’s over! And what’ll they do then? Then they’ll come crying to the ones they laughed at. They’ll come with their hands out to the ones who had the sense to prepare. To you. But you won’t be home. You’ll be here, invisible, where they can’t find you. Because you’ve prepared for that too... Your neighbour’s not your neighbour any more. He’s not someone you borrow a power hose from and talk to about the match. He’s someone taking the food meant for your children."

That's definitely Parable of the Sower territory...

*

There are things about the novel that don't work so well. Willie's speech at Trinity College, at which Cass is present, is one such. Here Murray tries to bring together what happened to Willie (after he "fell in love with a man, another student here, and it didn't work out"), and also have Willie underline our need to accept ourselves, while connecting that need with the imperative for us to rethink what makes us "us", so that we can save the environment... There's too much loaded onto this segue for it to feel anything other than artificial.

Cass's explorations of her sexuality also felt a tad drawn-out. Of course, this is the mirror held up to her father's closeted existence. But compared to the Olympian dramas of her parents' story, Cass's discoveries felt a little pedestrian.

There's a paragraph towards the end that is presumably a quote from one of Cass's lecturers, but sits there, rather unmoored: "Today, in the developed world, the great threat to political order is that people will pay attention to their surroundings. Thus, even slaves have access to entertainment. You could even say we are paid in entertainment. The novel was the first instance of what in the twenty-first century has become a vast and proliferating entertainment industry, an almost infinite machine designed to distract us and disempower us. We are presented with a virtual world powered, literally, by the incineration of the real." Fair enough, I suppose, but given that it's addressed to someone actually READING a novel, it feels a tad condescending. (It's the same beef, only on a much smaller scale, that I had with Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You?.)

But these things are quibbles. Minor blips in an incredibly powerfully told story.


Paul Murray

***

3.
Of note

-- Asked to identify the book that changed the way she thinks about the novel, the author of The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden, replied: "The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. It’s been a year and I’ve not stopped thinking, talking, preaching about The Bee Sting. Several hours’ worth of voice notes have been sent around to my friends about The Bee Sting. I didn’t know character work could do what it did; I didn’t know a 600-page family drama could be the most intense page-turner I’d ever read. I didn’t know reading about a teenage boy could be physically painful. I just didn’t know anyone could do what this novel did until I read it, and now I’m still reeling."

-- Asked about the darkness that swirls around The Bee Sting, Murray explains: "I started writing it at the end of 2017, with Trump, Brexit, Bolsonaro and climate change [in the news]. Then Covid came along. But I’ve got to say, when I was writing it, I felt very happy. It felt very organic and the characters felt quite alive for me, and I could just dump all of my sadness into the book and then go off and have a sandwich and feel fine." Gee, thanks, Mr Murray... I'm not sure I'll ever get rid of all the darkness in here...

-- There's a comment on Ryszard's ethnicity in this discussion of Polish protagonists in English-language literature: "The figure of Ryszard Brankowski... is certainly one of the most captivating literary representations of not only a Pole but also a foreigner, a work immigrant, trying to make a living in The British Isles in the early decades of the 21st century."