The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The Bee Sting is 643-page account of a messed-up family, the Barnes’. Mother (Imelda) and father (Dickie) are just holding steady, bored and dissatisfied with their lives and with each other. Father is a long-time closet case whose past will catch up with him, more than once. Daughter Cass is friends with Elaine, and may be in love with her. Son PJ wants to run away…he has an online friend and also has an IRL bully. All the men are weak, except for Frank, because he is dead, and Grandpa, who is carefree and rich. And for whatever reason all the generations of men after Grandpa windup owing money to someone.

Dickie is running a failing auto dealership that has been hit hard by the crash (not sure which one, there seems to always be a crash happening these days) and economic uncertainty is certainly a character in these pages.

And the titular bee sting is an event that happened on the day of Dickie and Imelda’s wedding. It may have been a misunderstanding…it may have been something deeper…but was this the point at which it all went wrong? Or was it sometime sooner?

It all starts with Cass and Elaine meeting in chemistry class and eventually we go back to Dickie and growing up with brother Frank, who was supposed to marry Imelda at one point, until he died.

Hey…it’s a little confusing. And it’s long. And it shifts tone and uses 2nd person perspective at one point (“You are doing this. You feel this way.” You know…like a choose Your Own Adventure Book.) There are huge sections of Imelda’s story where there is no punctuation
And the story just goes on And you don’t really know why this is happening It just does.

(this is what it’s like)
I actually skipped a huge part of this book because I really wasn’t following it. Like, 206 to 330 or something. I may have missed something important.

You may ask why I didn’t just toss the book at this point…and the thing is, there are some really enjoyable bits in this that remind me of why I like Paul Murray’s work in the first place. A young Irish writer (who is the same age as me, in fact.) who wrote the delightful Skippy Dies and An Evening of Long Goodbyes. I hesitate to even pan this. I just feel like I didn’t enjoy it and maybe the experimental nature of it worked against it…the last section ties it up as best as possible with a ping ponging of voices of all the characters as Dickie lies waiting to end his enemy in the shack in the woods that has taken many roles…the latest being a bunker in which to wait out the apocalypse. I learned a little bit about wells and groundwater.

I didn’t hate it. But we are going to settle on three stars.






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