BookBrowse Reviews The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

BookBrowse:

Award-winning novelist Paul Murray's The Bee Sting is a family drama that feels both expansive in its scope and intimate in its perceptions.

Readers of Paul Murray's Booker Prize–longlisted novel Skippy Dies won't be surprised at The Bee Sting's 650-page heft; Skippy Dies was just as heavy physically but lighter in tone. By contrast, The Bee Sting opens with a stark and far from comedic anecdote: "In the next town over, a man had killed his family.... Everyone was talking about it—about what kind of man could do such a thing, about the secrets he must have had." The incident grabs the attention of teenager Cass Barnes and her friend Elaine, who are fascinated by this tragedy so close to their small town outside Dublin, and also sets the mood for the story that follows.

Studious, high-achieving Cass has recently been drawn into the carefree, vivacious Elaine's orbit; daughters of two of the town's most prominent businessmen, the girls form a friendship that is both expected (by virtue of their proximity) and unlikely (due to their very different personalities). But as Cass grows increasingly fascinated by Elaine and worried that her family's money troubles might jeopardize her ability to afford Trinity College Dublin, she begins engaging in risks of all kinds, behavior with consequences that might make her academic choices for her.

Even less rationally, Cass's younger brother, 12-year-old PJ, has become convinced that the family's financial hardships might cause them to send him away to boarding school. He finds comfort and (he believes) friendship chatting online with strangers about video games, and hatches half-baked plans to run away and meet up with an online acquaintance in Dublin.

Cass and PJ's mother Imelda, a one-time beauty, is dealing with the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis by selling jewelry and other valuables on eBay while growing ever more suspicious and resentful of her husband. She finds comfort in the arms of Big Mike (Elaine's father), whose business sense, charisma, and competence couldn't be less like Imelda's husband Dickie.

How did the family get into this mess in the first place? Perhaps a shrewder or more passionate businessman could have pulled the family Volkswagen dealership through the economic downturn, but Dickie Barnes is not that man. He's failing, the business is failing, and so Dickie, who never wanted to run the business in the first place, chooses to retreat—taking up with a cagey conspiracy theorist and outfitting a forest shack as a survivalist bunker.

The novel concentrates on each of the members of the Barnes family in turn, initially in long narrative sections that could stand alone as substantial short stories, complete with distinctive narrative voices (particularly Imelda's, which reads almost as stream-of-consciousness, with little to no punctuation). At first, readers are introduced to each character's current circumstances and crises, but soon elements of their history become interwoven with their present, and it becomes increasingly clear that their motivations are far more complicated than they first appear, their secrets darker and more desperate, and their stakes extremely high.

The length of The Bee Sting means that Murray has a very large canvas with which to work, enabling him to engage with big issues like sexuality, immigration, childhood trauma, and social class. But this expansiveness also allows him to delve deeply into each character's personality and personal history, giving readers essentially a series of intimate portraits of the Barnes family members. The foreshadowing of tragedy that Murray sets in motion from that very first sentence of the novel becomes ever more imposing. Mistakes and secrets pile on top of one another, and as the narrative shifts more quickly between characters' perspectives, readers can start to foresee what might be about to happen, compelled to keep reading even as they hope against hope for a happy ending.

This review first ran in the August 2, 2023 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.