Booker shortlist review #4 – “The Bee Sting” by Paul Murray

The Bee Sting is by some measure the longest book on this year’s Booker shortlist and the one I have enjoyed the most so far. I do think I actually prefer a long book. Murray is an Irish novelist and this is his fourth novel. He is no stranger to the Booker as his second novel, Skippy Dies, was longlisted in 2010. He is also no stranger to prizes, his debut, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, having won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2003. So, he comes with something of a pedigree. 

The Bee Sting is a novel about a modern family living in an unnamed town in the Midlands in Ireland. Dickie Barnes runs the family business, a car dealership in the town, which was established by his father Maurice, an outgoing entrepreneurial type, who now lives in Portugal. Under Dickie’s stewardship however, and following a series of unfortunate events, including an economic downturn and a devastating flood, the business is now under threat. Dickie’s wife Imelda is introduced to us as superficial and glamorous and it is clear there are tensions in the marriage, worsened by the decline in the family’s fortunes.

But the novel opens with Cass, Dickie and Imelda’s teenage daughter, whose main preoccupations in life are social media and fantasising about a future life as a bohemian living in the city with her best friend Elaine. There is also PJ, her younger brother, who lives for computer games, his friends and the woods at the back of the family home which form part of their land and in which there is a brick outhouse they call the bunker.

Each member of the family gets a long section of the book to tell their story and gradually we learn more about their internal dilemmas. Imelda, for example, is far from the vacuous character her daughter believes her to be. We learn that she grew up in a violent, deprived and socially outcast family. She was the only girl in the family and her mother died when she was a teenager. She is a renowned beauty though, which is both her gift and a curse. When she meets and falls in love with the charismatic Frank Barnes, son of local businessman Maurice and a gifted football player, it looks as if she will finally escape her violent and vulgar father and brothers. But then Frank is killed in a car accident. 

Frank’s family is devastated by grief. Dickie comes home from Trinity (having had a mixed experience there himself) and decides that he will step in to run the garage with his father and marry Imelda, look after her the way Frank would have wanted. On their wedding day, Imelda arrives at church and refuses to lift her veil for the whole day – a bee became trapped in the fabric inside the car on the way to the church, she says, and stung her face. (When Cass learns of this story via a newspaper clipping on the internet it only confirms her perception of her mother as vain and superficial.) For Imelda and Dickie, we are invited to consider whether this was a dark omen overshadowing their future.

This the basic story of the novel and as we hear each character’s perspective on both past and present events, layers of the onion are gradually peeled away to reveal a set of four people wrestling with deep insecurities, questioning themselves and their decisions, and yet curiously unable to meet each other in their place of need. There is love, but they are hamstrung and unable to express it. Overshadowing the novel is the threat of climate change. As an escape from his problems, Dickie develops a strange friendship with handyman Victor, a single, lonely bachelor obsessed with wiping out the grey squirrel population and ‘prepping’ for the end of civilisation as we know it. This thread of the story provides some light relief (yes, really!) at times

This novel is darkly comic in places – you may feel guilty at some of the laugh out loud moments – and deeply affecting in others. The characters are brilliantly drawn, particularly the young people I felt. I listened to it on audio and was very impressed by all the performances. Its scope is relatively small, a single family of four, surprising for such a long novel, but it explores great depths and is thoroughly engaging. If I have any criticism, I think, for me, it was the ending, which obviously I’m not going to reveal here. I felt built up to a pitch of tension and then badly let down. So, I’m a little bit cross about that! 

Still highly recommended though.