The Bee Sting

by Paul Murray

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's car business is going under, but instead of doing anything about it, he's out in the woods preparing for the actual end of the world. Meanwhile his wife Imelda is selling off her jewellery on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attentions of fast-talking local wrongun Big Mike. Their teenage daughter Cass, usually top of her class, seems determined to drink her way through the whole thing. And twelve year old PJ is spending more and more time on video game forums, where he's met a friendly boy named Ethan who never turns his camera on and wants PJ to run away from home.

Digging down through layers of family history, the roots of this crisis stretch deep into the past. Meanwhile in the present, the fault lines keep spreading, ghosts slipping in through the cracks, and every step brings the Barneses closer to a fatal precipice. When the moment of reckoning finally arrives, all four of them must decide how far they're willing to go to save the family, and whether - if the story's already been written - there's still time to give it a happy ending...

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Book Club, Ireland, Irish Literature, Audiobook

645 pages, Paperback

First published June 8, 2023

About the author

Paul Murray is an Irish novelist. He studied English literature at Trinity College, Dublin and has written two novels: An Evening of Long Goodbyes (shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize in 2003, and nominated for the Kerry Irish Fiction Award) and Skippy Dies (longlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize and the 2010 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award for comic fiction).

Reviews

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

no one talk to me. i need to lay facedown with fairytale of new york on repeat and think about this book until i feel better.

i physically couldn't put this book down.

not in the can't get enough way you say when you mean "i loved this book so much." i couldn't put it down because when i did i got so overwhelmed with anxiety that i felt ill.

my animal brain responded to the unrelenting series of tiny cuts presented in this book with an actual fight or flight response. ultimately i had to give into the agoraphobia and stay inside my house for a full day (canceling plans, rescheduling errands, missing myriad notifications) to knock out the final 400 pages. it was too debilitating. 

people talk a lot about hanya yanagihara's a little life as maybe the most upsetting book of all time. to me, this one was worse.

we follow dickie, inheritor of his father's car dealership in a small country town in ireland; his wife, imelda, the most beautiful woman around; their daughter, cass, navigating a toxic and intoxicating friendship with the coolest girl in school; and their son, pj, who is texting a stranger from the internet a lot.

each of them is so lonely, too sensitive for the world and the paltry, mundane wounds it gives us. from climate change to doomsday prep, academics to bereavement, sexuality to solitude, every burden life has to offer found its way to this family, and each and every one hit its mark.

i found myself so miserable while reading that i tried to belatedly bargain with the book: if this story has a happy ending, i'll love it. if these characters have a moment of familial connection and contentment, i'll five star it. if any of the characters tells a single one of their secrets to any of the others, it'll be my favorite book ever.

i'm not a big fan of sad books, not because i chafe at the idea of being unhappy for even a moment (that too) but because i find myself less impressed with stories that exist on a narrow emotional scale. even the moments of happiness in this book are told reflectively, a now-suffering character casting their eye back on a perfected past. 

while i wanted more than anything for these people to find happiness, that wasn't (solely) because they were so incredible and i was so invested in them. i wanted a change to the one-note narrative i'd been immersed in for 650 pages.

the fact that it didn't come and i'm still impressed with this book is high praise. 

it doesn't seem like hope appears on page, but i had it anyway. in spite of it all, this book is brilliantly, hilariously written, with unique style and consuming story.

bottom line: i hated it and i loved it and it infuriated and devastated me and i craved being done and never wanted it to end and isn't that just life.

[Andy Marr · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ooft. Such a disappointment! This absolute brick of a book just went on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. For two months, I stuck with it because I'm a nosy bastard, and I couldn't stand not to know what happened to Dickie and co. Turns out, Paul Murray kept the ending deliberately ambiguous.

Two. Months.

Paul Murray and I are no longer friends.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

1) After the horrible misstep of The Mark and the Void I am so happy to report that Paul Murray is BACK. Skippy Dies is one of my all time favourite novels and I knew it couldn’t be a one-off, and here is the proof.

2) Paul Murray has a rare, exquisite gift for writing about kids and the way they think and talk without looking like your dad in a nightclub. Poor PJ (aged 12) – we agonise along with him so much as he overthinks and applies way too much logic to his life. And he is like a tiny but just as annoying Bill Bryson - did you know that the human body contains two litres of non-human bacteria? No, me neither. Thanks PJ.

3) The Victorians had an excuse for writing freaking long novels, there was nothing else to do but read back then, it was either novels or catch smallpox or polish something or clean a mountain of shoes. They couldn’t even phone each other back then! But these days when I am frequently told TikTok and Instagram have destroyed modern attention spans and no one can concentrate for more than 23 seconds authors constantly deliver unto us enormous beasts like this one, 646 pages, what happened Hamish Hamilton, did all your editors die? This novel is more than somewhat too long.

4 ) It’s Flashback City. Paul Murray concocts some very excruciating situations for his colourful cast of characters - say for example a Big Decision – your character will be streaming their consciousness as they drive in their car (a lot of driving) towards the Big Decision and they will be forever flashbacking to the various bits of the story that led up to this moment (which we have already been through once). And this finally started to get on my nerves, I have to admit. Stop blathering about The Past all the time! I was heard to howl. Just get on with it! Please! This once! In fact one character berates another for doing just that, but actually, they all do it. And do they ever get on with doing the thing we've been waiting for them to do for the last 100 pages? Nope, this lot, they are the wild procrastinators, they never get on with it, never reveal feelings, never admit stuff, never leave, never explain except in their own minds where they explain and mull and ruminate about that thing that happened and that wedding day or that car crash. It wears you down.

5) I hate these fucking places, Caleb says. Everyone’s so self-congratulatory. Acting like they’re Che Guevara because they’re wearing their mam’s earrings? He looks round at the crowd and scowls. I bet you a million euro that when they’re not here performing their category, ninety percent of these people work for some tech firm that runs on tax evasion and Chinese labour camps.

Modern novels that are set in contemporary times have this perpetual tendency to turn into bitter black-humored sociological commentary – it seems to be inescapable. Bret Easton Ellis and Edward St Aubyn do it all the time, and it’s all over such novels as The Slap, The Ask, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Animals, Dietland and a trillion that I haven’t read.

6) This book is full of things that don’t happen. And it makes you think that your own life is also full of things that didn’t happen. Some of which we should be very glad about.

7) Two favourite quotes :

She’d opened the door and found him there and got a shock – though really it was more the shape of a shock, without the feeling, like the postman bringing you a letter with nothing inside it.

The girls are scrolling through a dating app and saying stuff like OMG that is literally the most terrifying man I’ve ever seen. "Have my own business with van” – great, perfect for disposing of your body

Then :

That’s a nice dog though. I would actually date that dog.
Me too, they should have an app for available dogs.

8) If it wasn’t for all the flashbacking which makes your neck ache, being yanked this way and that way, and the one hundred pages too many, this is a 4.5 star novel.

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Bee Sting is a caustic family chronicle… A saga of a family gradually growing dysfunctional… Three generations… Four narrators…
Cass… A daughter is a teenage schoolgirl… She and her friend are full of sweet dreams and far-reaching plans…

On the way home Elaine told Cass she was going to post her poem on her Instagram. She had discovered that there was a new generation of lady poets who posted their poems online and got millions of views. They wrote about real-life issues, like racism and homophobia, and were friends with singers, influencers and other celebrities. You could actually become seriously famous from poetry, Elaine noted.

But physiology and hormones of youth win over her… 
PJ… A preteen schoolboy… He – similar to the majority of mankind now – is a slave of his mobile phone… He is a freaking gamer…

More Nazis rise up out of the floor to block the way; their withered hands reach and spread till they fill the screen, like bare tree branches. Then a curtain of blood falls to cover everything.

He is full of his own anxiety and his own phobias…
Imelda… A beautiful mother recalls the days of her troubled adolescence and youth… One fine evening she suddenly sees a true love of her life…

Nothing to stop the boy as he came towards her
It seemed the crowd parted to let him through Heads turned to follow him Even in the gammy light of Pap’s his eyes were clear blue like mountain pools and when she looked into them everything around seemed to dim to nothing like it had turned to steam
What’s a girl like you doing in this kip he said

But things not always add up the way one wishes… So everything goes crashing down…
Dickie… A miserable father… He recollects the time when he was a student… And a skeleton crawls out of the cupboard… Dickie is defeated by ruthless life… He looks for a place to hide from the world…

That life is behind you. The story is over, the debt is paid, the darkness of those years dispelled. And the person that remains, the man here in the woods – is you.

The world isn’t just a vanity fair – it is also a futility fair.

[Paddy Sheridan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is the literary equivalent of a very large box of Pringles. At first you sense that it might be interesting, then you realise that you’re not enjoying it and that it’s having a negative effect on you but you keep reading anyway just in case you’re wrong. In the end you hate the book, you despise yourself because of the amount of time you’ve wasted in reading it but you persevere in the hope of some redemption at the end. But no, there’s no redemption - you hate yourself even more when you reach the end … but not as much as you hate the author, the editors who failed catastrophically at their job, the publishers and the pretentious sycophants who gave it glowing reviews.

[Ron Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two decades ago, the Irish writer Paul Murray started his career by publishing “An Evening of Long Goodbyes,” a book that has remained one of this century’s greatest comedies. With this month’s publication of “The Bee Sting,” Murray has written a book that could remain one of its greatest novels.

He was hardly sitting still between these two triumphs. In 2010, “Skippy Dies” was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and in 2016, “The Mark and the Void” was joint winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, a British award for comic literature.

Admittedly, even that record of success might not be enough to draw American readers to Murray’s new 650-page epic, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize on Aug. 1. But anyone who starts “The Bee Sting” will be immediately absorbed by this extraordinary story about the derailing of a once prosperous family. Although Murray is a fantastically witty writer, his empathy with these characters is so deep that he can convey the comedy of their foibles without the condescending bitterness of satire. His command of their lives is so detailed that he can strip away every pretense and lie without spoiling a surprise. And, most impressive, while sinking into the peculiar flaws of this one uniquely troubled family, Murray captures the anxiety many of us feel living on the edge of economic ruin in these latter days of the Anthropocene Epoch.

In the small Irish town where “The Bee Sting” unfolds, Dickie and Imelda Barnes are a prominent couple. Dickie runs a car dealership owned by his retired father, and his wife, Imelda, is a legendary beauty. But as the novel opens, the pretty facade of their lives has started to. . . .

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...

[Will Byrnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the next town over, a man had killed his family. He’d nailed the doors shut so they couldn’t get out; the neighbours heard them running through the rooms, screaming for mercy. When he had finished he turned the gun on himself.
Everyone was talking about it – about what kind of man could do such a thing, about the secrets he must have had. Rumours swirled about affairs, addiction, hidden files on his computer.
Elaine just said she was surprised it didn’t happen more often.

--------------------------------------

For months now she has been having the same dream Of a flood that sweeps through the house Carries off clothes from the wardrobes Toys from the cupboards Food from the table In the dream she is trying to stop it She is wading around, pulling things out of the water But there’s too much to hold in her arms and it overcomes her The current grows stronger Pulls away the appliances the kitchen island tiles from the floor paint from the at the edge of the water watching her go Staring down as she’s swept past In their eyes she is old Her youth is gone too It has all been washed away by the water

The Barnes family is having their problems. It is 2014 in small-town Ireland. We follow Dickie, Imelda, his wife, PJ, their son, and Cass, a high school senior, through a range of travails. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina opens with, Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Guess which category the Barnes family fits into.

PJ is almost a teen, so will have a lot of growing-up to do, but he is faced already with challenges that are plenty daunting. Coping with bullies at school is no fun, if a particularly usual checklist item in coming-of-age stories. But he is also beset by the thug teen child of one of his father’s customers, who feels his family has been cheated by Dickie. Beatings happen, and more are promised if he does not pay up. And these are the lesser of the challenges he faces. On the upside, he likes spending time hanging out with his father, working on a project in the woods behind their house.


Paul Murray - image from the Hindustan Times - shot by Lee Pelligrini

Cass has teen-angst aplenty, coping with her social status, her newly-ripening sexuality and her attraction to a promiscuous friend. She is trying to define who she is. (which is not exactly a wonderful person when we meet her.) A part of that is seeing herself as separate from her family. She would definitely not want to be associated with those people. She is particularly hostile to her father, blaming him for the demise of the family business, and the collateral social impact that is having on her. She is not a stunner like her mother, which does not help. The prospect of heading off to college in Dublin offers a concrete escape route, the sooner the better. She is besties, I guess, with Elaine, who is as amoral and unfeeling as she is beautiful.

Imelda came from a working-class family. Rough around the edges would be a kind description. But she was born a knockout. It was always going to be her ticket out. She falls in love with the town’s football superstar, Frank. They are to be wed. Frank stands to inherit a successful family business, and should be able to provide nicely for her. Problem is a literal crash and burn, and buh-bye Frank. She winds up marrying Frank’s older, smarter, but not-golden-boyish brother, Dickie.

Dickie had the brains for college, and attended, for a few years, until an unfortunate event derailed his collegiate career and he headed home. He may have been the smarter of the brothers, but Frank had the gift of salesmanship, and was a better fit to take over the car dealership. But when Frank dies, it falls to Dickie to step in. He manages, but it is not work he exactly loves.

These days, he is spending time in the woods behind their home, building a defense against Armageddon, spurred on by a troll-like employee who exhales conspiracy theories and seems to be looking forward to the coming end-times. He has a lot of time on his hands. The car-dealership is in the crapper. Along with plenty of other businesses, suffering not only from a global economic downturn, but massive flooding in the town. Dickie’s father, Maurice, retired, but still the owner, swoops in to try to fix things, blaming Dickie for the difficulties. Dickie is not entirely faultless here. But there are serious complications with him.

We follow these four for over six hundred pages, getting to know them intimately. We learn their secrets, see them change, see them cope with relentless stressors, see them grow, or not. This is the greatest power of the novel. Each is faced with decisions, moral choices, that define their character, that define their changes, maybe their failures. If that were all, it would be an outstanding piece of work, but Murray offers a very rich palette of content as well, raising it to another level.

There are many notions that run throughout The Bee Sting’s considerable girth. Space has been reserved to handle them all. The core, of course, is family. Not exactly the most functional, the Barnses. Parents who have been raised to hide their emotions have no natural ability to make a happy home.

You couldn’t protect the people you loved – that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering. He said I love you to his wife and it felt like a curse, an invitation to Fate to swerve a fuel truck head-on into her, to send a stray spark shooting from the fireplace to her dressing gown. He saw her screaming, her poor terrified face beneath his, as she writhed in flames on the living-room carpet. And the child too! Though she hadn’t yet been born, she was there too. All night he listened to her scream in his head – he couldn’t sleep from it, he just lay there and sobbed, because he knew he couldn’t protect her, couldn’t protect her enough…

On top of which, secrets abound. They are all trying to find a way out, except for PJ, who is mostly interested in seeing things returned to the way they were before the dealership miseries began, and radiated outward. Murray shows how dysfunction and damage can carry forward from one generation to the next, the brutality of Imelda’s family, the emotional absence of Dickie’s. But all has not been destroyed.

When Dad was fun everything was fun. Not just holidays, not just Christmas. Going to the supermarket! Cutting the grass! At bedtime they had pyjama races, they read Lord of the Rings cover to cover, they put a torch under their chins and told each other ghost stories…

Family connection is important, mostly in the desire of most to sever it. Dickie was desperate as a young man to get away, get an education, do something other than sell cars for the rest of his life. Imelda came from a toxic family (not all of them) and also struggles with her connection to the family she is in, for current-day part of the story. Cass wants out, ASAP. Tethers are cut, but some are also sewn. The tension between these struggles is fuel for the story.

Murray looks at the impact of the environment on peoples’ lives. The story is set at the tail end of the recession from the Celtic Tiger boom that had preceded. The economic environment was still pretty tough and we see how this impacts the family.

It will come as no shock that a major, unusual, flood impacts Dickie’s already sinking business, with talk of liquidation, that a water leak in the Barnes house carries omens, and that Imelda dreams of being washed away, as she is forced to cope with losing the luxury level lifestyle to which she thinks her incredible beauty entitles her. Cass’s collegiate prospects and social standing are endangered. Other players in the story are challenged as well. PJ is fast out-growing all his clothing, but does not want to be a burden on the now-struggling family, so keeps quiet and castigates his feet for growing too much. There is a stream involving the presence of gray squirrels in Ireland. They are an invasive species, as of a century back, and carry a disease that is fatal to the native red squirrels. Are they the only locals in danger of being wiped out?

Another stream is the notion of returning, coming back from the dead, in particular.

Some people might say that the key problem is with coming back from the dead specifically. Because obviously death is a pretty serious step with all kinds of long-term effects that you’re not going to just shake off. But lately you’ve noticed it with other things too, that even though they never actually died, when they came back from where they’d gone they were still completely changed.

Imelda keeps looking for the ghost of Frank to show up at her wedding to Dickie. Dickie is definitely not the same after returning from Dublin. Same for Cass and PJ. Other characters, a maid, a mechanic, a patriarch, return as well, with mixed results.

…is it worth taking the risk? Sometimes? If you could still sort of see the person they were and you thought maybe there was still enough time, if you knew what to do or say?

Bees get a bit of attention, if a bit less than expected. The bee sting of the title is inflicted on Imelda, on her way to her wedding to Dickie. Her face was in no condition to be seen, so every wedding picture of her is through her veil. There is another passage about the mating habits of bees. It does not end well for the males.

…the pesticide the farmers use on plants contains a neuro-toxin that destroys their memory so they forget their way home, can’t make it back to the hive where they live, and that’s why they’re dying out. When they looked in the hives they found them not full of dead bees, but mysteriously empty. Maybe that’s what happened to Cass, you think. Maybe air pollution in the city has damaged her brain and now she’s forgotten her home. Though really you know it started way before she came here.

The impact of stinging on the stinger is also considered.

There is even a bit of magic as Imelda’s Aunt Rose has a particular gift, sees things that others cannot, says sooths, a family thing, but not one that Imelda has ever manifested.

Murray writes in differing styles. Most of the book is presented as third-person omniscient, describing the actions and peering inside to reveal the characters’ thoughts and feelings. Standard stuff. The final section, The Age of Loneliness, is written in the second person. We alternately assume the POV of the main characters, as each races toward the stunning climax. Imelda gets a breathless, minimally formatted structure. There is a sample in the second quote at the top of this review.

I wrote Imelda’s section, and I knew she was on her way to this dinner… I wrote that first line like she, well, she needs to use the bathroom really urgently. And I put commas in and a full stop. And it did not feel right at all. The only way to write it was without the punctuation, and I wanted it to feel like you’re in her head. She doesn’t parse things in the same educated way that Dickie or indeed the kids would do. She just thinks in this much more immediate, intensive way. When you go from the kids’ sections into Imelda’s section, I wanted it to feel like, woah, there’s a change in gear here. Like there’s something’s going on that hasn’t been apparent up until now. At this moment in her life, but maybe at every point in her life, everything feels extremely precarious. She’s on this knife edge, all the time. She always feels like everything’s going to collapse, the floor is going to disappear from under her and she’s going to just tumble down into the past with her abusive dad and the poverty and the grimness and stuff. - from the. Hindustani Times interview

It would not be a Paul Murray novel if you did not come away from the reading without a few more laugh lines in your face. He takes the most liberty with this in the teens’ sections, the most reminiscent of the grand, rude humor of Skippy Dies to be found here. For example

Nature in her eyes was almost as bad as sports. The way it kept growing? The way things, like crops or whatever, would die and then next year they came back? Did no one else get how creepy that was?

or

Behind him, another boy, not as tall but slightly droopier, had started kissing Elaine. It was distracting; it seemed like she could hear it even over the metal, a squelching noise like walking on frogspawn.

or

It feels weird reading a prayer off his phone, where he has looked at so many unreligious things. He hopes the Virgin Mary knows it’s meant for her, that he’s not praying to e.g. Candy Crush or Pornhub.

You get the idea. Love this stuff.

So what’s not to like? Nothing, nothing at all. This is a wonderful, engaging, risk-taking, funny, moving, horrifying, engaging, biting, human triumph of a novel. You may feel stung by elements in this great tale, but you will come away with a literary trove of honey.

Ireland is a place where people are very good at talking. People are so funny and have such brilliant stories, and it’s a way to disguise what you’re actually feeling. The reason, I think, is because this is a place where very terrible things have happened and the way we deal with them is by not addressing them. So I feel like the ghosts are alive and they’re active. The past is affecting what you’re doing in a very real way. And if you don’t address the issues, then the darkness just grows, and the damage gets passed down from one generation to the next, like in the book. – from the Guardian interview

Review posted - 12/8/23

Publication dates
----------Hardover – 8/15/23
----------Trade paperback - 5/2/24

The Bee Sting was short-listed for the Booker Prize


I received an ARE of The Bee Sting from FSG in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.



This review is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi!

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Paul Murray pages on Wikipedia and Goodreads

Interviews
-----Hindustani Times - Paul Murray – “Climate change is something I worry about all the time” by Saudamini Jain – READ THIS ONE
----- The Guardian - Paul Murray: ‘I just dumped all my sadness into the book’ by Killian Fox
-----The Booker Prizes - A Q&A with Booker Prize 2023 shortlisted author Paul Murray - video – 4:08
-----Service 95 - The Book Club Interview: Dua [Lipa] & Paul Murray Discuss His Novel, The Bee Sting - video – 43:19

My review of an earlier book by Murray
-----Skippy Dies – one of the best books EVER!

Items of Interest from the author
-----New York Magazine – 3/15/23 - Who is Still Inside the Metaverse?
-----The Guardian - Paul Murray: ‘How the banks got rich off poor people would be a painful read without comedy’ on The Mark and the Void
-----Boston College Libraries – Fall 2022 - How to Write a Novel - video – 1:20:05 - Paul from 7:45 - On the book from 18:25 – well, sort of - Largely about why it took so long between novels – and his experience with screenwriting - Wicked funny, too.
-----Outlook India - Excerpt

[Jennifer nyc · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

Mostly a thoroughly enjoyable 5-star read with a disorienting dip in the 3rd quarter that eventually righted itself. But the ending frustrated me to the point of almost erasing all pleasure from the story. After immersing us so much in these lives, the culminating event at the end gave me zero satisfaction. I loved this world for most of the ride, but grrrr right now

[Adina]

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023

Gave up the audiobook after 4h38m out of 26h10m.

Too long to battle through a book I do not particularly enjoy. Ok, I am not a fan of family drama in general although I can appreciate some of them. The Bee Sting is definetly well written but failed to grab me and the size does not help. The novel is the story of an Irish family of 4 who sinks together with the family business.

[David]

DNF. I struggled for several weeks to get traction with this and just couldn't do it. I understand and appreciate what Murray is doing with it, or at least what I think he's doing with it. I read it in part as a subversion of the kinds of novels I dislike, particularly a critique of an overlong family melodrama. But even a subversion of that kind of novel requires the plot and characters to be taken somewhat seriously for the farcical elements to stick. At 600+ pages, I just couldn't face it. In the end, I find myself agreeing with those who like it for what it does, as well as with those who dislike it for all the reasons I couldn't force myself to read it.

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

"That ending."

I skimmed through several reviews of this enormous, immersive, family saga set in contemporary Ireland, and found that most people referred (with frustration) to "that ending".

I myself just reached the ending, after having been entertained and moved and in admiration of Paul Murray's literary talents for over 600 pages... and I was left breathless. I actually gasped, and tears were in my eyes. That ending.

I loved the ending, even though I DO understand why it bothers readers. I see it. I feel you, those of you who are bewildered and annoyed and let down by it. That (wholly ridiculous, one might say) intersection, which never intersects, the resolution that never sings, the tragedy that never gets to break, the redemption that lays buried.

For me, though, the ending didn't need to be more than it was. I don't know... I see the characters in this story as players, who are continually haunted and trapped by their past, who are afraid of the future, who are living quite siloed experiences, even when living in the same house, running together yet separate. So alone.

The ending showed the book as a subversive thing. Subverting expectations and dashing hopes, subverting form - hey, that's not how a domestic drama should end! But I loved it because it rose up above expectation and form. The heartbreaking solo experience of humanity, Murray captured it here, with warmth and empathy.

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I’m changing the truth.”

Let me start, though, at the end. And at the end, my fugitive heart flew out of my delicate chest and expanded, inflated, soared on puffy wings and a pagan prayer. The end. I’d rather finish there than spoil it for readers, as every single page bulges with new discoveries and the celebration of the novel form itself.

The story takes place in a berg a few hours from Dublin, and Dickie and Imelda Barnes, once wealthy from the VW sales and garage business (inherited from Dickie’s father), are now struggling due to the financial crash. So, it is probably just a few years after 2008, but not specifically stated.

Dickie and Imelda carry their secrets about like albatrosses. Imelda, in her late thirties, is and was the most beautiful woman in four provinces. As a young teen, she was the poor Cinderella waiting for her prince. She met Frank, Dickie’s younger brother--an athlete, a stunner, a charmer. She fell in love. And once you learn about Imelda’s family, you’ll want her to fall in love, too. But then tragedy strikes. We know this up front, what we don’t know is why Imelda married Dickie after all this. It’s all part of the masquerade and how the past keeps insisting on the present. And the future is already in crisis.

One of its prominent themes is that you can’t dismiss the past, and you can’t take it down. You have to live with it in the present and reckon with it if you want to have a future. There’s a fable that Imelda, the mother/wife character, is reminded of. It is a Brigadoon-esque fable, (but from Irish folklore), where a man sees a door, opens it, enjoys a hedonistic experience, only to find that, when he leaves, it is 100 years later and his family is dead and gone.

The present also kicks up plenty of dirt in this masterpiece. How does Murray do this? The past unwinds, then rewinds, then ferociously unspools, while the present comes thundering in like a flood. “Every moment was the moment when everything changed.”

While the past rears its ugly head as a portentous cataclysm of the here-and-now, I wondered how the future would unfold. Murray is a spry reader’s writer, he’s a fusion artist--of how a postmodern novel can embrace the old form of a narrative and give the reader that sense of extended drama. Murray enfolds the art of the conventional novel and then, simultaneously, sticks a fork in it, blows it up, and then carries on and takes you with him.

This book seemed to contain at least a thousand pages in its 643, yet I digested it as if it were only 100. There’s absolutely no fluff in here, no padding, no extra or waste. Every word needs to be there, each page contains multitudes. It isn’t the headache-inducing density type of text, it isn’t whimsical, either. It’s natural and imaginative in correspondence. Cynicism has no footing here, so the characters and storytelling are generous, irresistible.

BEE STING is full of people at their most desperate, and consequently they leak their hidden desires, needs, and display impulsive conduct. The family is frantic from the endless fallout of the crash, and their fate intersects with the powers of the past. The humanity in this story is compelling, the dialogue, setting, and events grounded in a relatable reality, however wild and furious it gets. Pain and pleasure are mutual, often in concert.

The setting is on a collision course with climate change—drought, flood, belligerent heat, other natural disasters or near-disasters. Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay to survive, and Dickie is rapidly declining—emotionally--all the while building a bunker in the woods with his peculiar friend, Victor. The family of four are all slipping gradually through the cracks, like getting buried in an earthquake.

Imelda and Dickie’s teenage daughter, Cass, is hopefully headed for Trinity College in Dublin. She aims to ride on the coattails of her best friend, Elaine. Cass will do anything for Elaine, she’s in her thrall. Cass’ 12-year-old brother, PJ, is a science nerd, a video-game geek, who suffers from adolescent problems to the 10th power, especially as some menacing oaf is putting PJ’s life in danger, demanding money. Oh, and there is an Aunt Rose who is straight out of a fairytale, who can foretell the future.

Each character has their own chapters/sections and are punctuated (or not punctuated at all) to match their thoughts, feelings, and approach to the world. Before you turn away from Imelda’s zero punctuation, know this: Paul Murray’s superb writing gently coaxes you to quickly imbibe his rhythm. You’re willing because it’s organic and authentic. The nature of Imelda’s character and how she thinks and talks seduces you right from the start. It’s like canoeing on accelerated waters---you will place your oars in the water to go with the flow. It’s not hard. It requires you to pay attention, but the sweep and movement of the narrative suck you right in.

BEE STING has girth, it has weight, and the rhythm is musical, lyrical; the story had its hooks in me straight off. And I’ve never been so fascinated with a writer’s ability to pull the past into the center of the present. I keep going back to that point, I know. The stylistic mastery of this author blew me away. The microcosm of this story within the macrocosm of Ireland is finely polished, even when feelings are bitter and raw. I twinned with Murray, as if the words came from my own mouth. It was like me telling this story to me. You don’t need an audio book; this reads like audible language that you can hear, in your ears and in your soul.

This is a brilliant book, my first Paul Murray, and I’ve already ordered the rest of his oeuvre. I won’t bore you with, “If you only read one book this year…” but if you want an unsentimental soap opera without the soap, which is credible and emotionally satisfying, with an ending that will have everyone debating, well, you’ve come to the right novel.

Murray is sly and cheeky. I see the Franzen influence. I also see an incisive David Foster Wallace influence (INFINITE JEST) right here:

“…we are paid in entertainment. The novel was the first instance in 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.”

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Winner of the inaugural Sky Arts Awards Literature category
Winner of the inaugural Nero Gold Award - Book of the Year 2023
Winner of the inaugural Nero Book Awards Fiction category as I predicted pre shortlist
Winner of the Irish Book of The Year Award
Shortlisted for the 2024 Writers Prize.
Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize
#11 in my Booker Prize longlist rankings after reading all the longlist books twice.

My Instagram post on what worked for me, what did not, my favourite quote and of course a book-themed Golden Retriever photo here:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CxKYpvygp...

Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize - I originally read this around two weeks ahead of the longlist announcement as it has been included in some Booker speculation - of the nearly 80 eligible books I pre-read I ranked this below 60th.

Having said that, and after re-reading it, I do think it’s a very possible winner -it’s certainly an early Bookstagram favourite - and in terms of the popularity of the prize a far from unreasonable winner. It strikes me, of all the longlist books, as the one readers might most readily press into someone else’s hand and say “you must read this” … although that was really the historic criteria of the Costa Prize for which I think this would have been a better fit, and this therefore may well be a strong contender for the inaugural Nero Prize.

On literary merit though - I don’t think it’s Finest Fiction, which should be the Booker criteria.

On a second read I found the Imelda section a little disappointing. It really did not I think fully capture her supposed scattergun non-sequitur filled way of talking that Cass describes. And it is definitely where the book gains in size (it’s a very lengthy section) what it loses in focus. For all the exhaustive dissection of Imelda’s life - most of it supposedly occurring in flashback around the time of a Lion’s Dinner honouring Maurice which takes place in the same venue as her wedding to Dickie, many of the key elements of that day are withheld until a later section.

I did appreciate though the way in which Mike appeals to Imelda via a shared experience of extreme childhood poverty, and the Cass/Elaine dynamics remain strong.

And the folktale of the man who parties with the fairies only to find on returning to the world that 100 years have past and all he loved - one I slightly struggled with first time as it applied to character’s individual lives - worked best second time for me when I interpreted it as a metaphor for the Celtic Tiger years in Ireland and for Western consumerism/late capitalism and climate change (the latter subject which is also cleverly linked to the Magdalene Laundries).

But it’s the ending that still does not work for me, when viewed through a literary/finest fiction lens. Not the final scenes (although that is rather too clunkily signposted from the first line of the book) but the pages leading up to it where there are too many coincidences (just a couple of examples but Cass while in Dublin attends a talk by Willie where he talks - unknown to her - about her father, and a few pages later is unknowingly next to Ethan in a shop), too many last minute interventions and far too many of the characters converging in the last pages including some long thought lost.

We need to take off our masks …. And that's hard, after a lifetime of hiding away, it's existentially hard, take it from me. But once you do it, the world is transformed. Once you take off your mask, it's like all the other masks become transparent, and you can see that beneath our individual quirks and weirdnesses, we're he same. We are the same in being different, in feeling bad about being different. Or to put it another way, we are all different expressions of the same vulnerability and need. That's what binds us together. And once we recognize it, once we see ourselves as a community of difference, the differences themselves no longer define us. That's when we can start to work together and things can change.

ORIGINAL JULY 2023 REVIEW

A more than 600+ page family tale switching over a year (albeit with frequent flashbacks) or so between the viewpoints of four members of a nuclear Irish family, for whom the Irish financial crash had uncovered buried tensions and secrets of the past, and one which takes place against the emerging threat of climate change.

Initially I found this an engrossing read, the author’s ability to cleverly capture the four different voices and the way in which we gained insight and different perspective over time impressive; the repeated imagery and stories intriguing; but the book took for me an unwelcome turn, rather overstayed its welcome (the amount of plot did not at justify in my view the book’s length which seemed more a product of lack of editing) and had an ending which was stylistically clever but for me ill-judged in a narrative sense.

The family are father Dickie, his wife Imelda, his daughter Cass and son PJ.

Dickie runs the family motor dealer business set up by his father Maurice (now semi-retired in Portugal). Dickie had a younger brother Frank, a renowned GAA participant (particularly at Gaelic football) who died when Dickie was at Trinity – we also learn that Frank was initially engaged to the Imelda – beautiful but from a poor background - and the sequence of events which lead to her then marrying Dickie shortly after (already pregnant with Cass) and Dickie then ending up back in the family business, as well as the ghost of other lives that may have occurred for both of them, lies heavily on their lives and across the novel.

It has to be said that the idea of choices made – and the imagining of alternative future pathways becomes a little too common as the book goes on.

At the start of the book – the business is failing badly in the second-third year of the economic downturn, Dickie seems powerless to run it around and Imelda (something of a consumerholic) despairs at having to start selling everything she has accumulated over the years. All this is seen through the voice of Cass – one of the brightest girls at her school and coming up to the Leavers Certificate she expects to win her a place at Dublin, but increasingly obsessed with Elaine – the beautiful but capricious daughter of the other local businessman Big Mike a cattle dealer turned property developer.

We then change voice to PJ – who spends much of his time online chatting to a friend Ethan on a Game Board, his school days avoiding bullies – particularly one who claims Dickie owes his family money and that he will badly beat up PJ if he does not get the money - and the rest of his time worrying about his family situation – wearing too small shoes as he does not think they can afford new ones and oddly obsessed that his parents will get divorced and/or send him to boarding school.

In both sections Murray’s ability to capture the voices and inhabit the character of a older teenage girl and a rather nerdy 12 year old boy is impressive – and there is a light undercurrent of humour despite the travails of the family and the personal anguish of the two children.

Next up is Imelda, desperate for Dickie to ask Maurice for help. We learn via flashbacks much of her early life (in a desperately poor family with a violent ex bare knuckle fighter father - her only real ally her youngest brother Lar) and how she met Frank – whose sporting prowess charmed her father just as his poverty and violence rather repelled Maurice. This is in many ways a powerful section, and written in a rather breathless as well as unpunctuated style meant to capture both Imelda’s lack of formal education and her rather scattergun style of speaking/thinking. A number of media reviews have referred to this as a stream-of-consciousness style and invoked Molly Bloom but I think that is misleading and not intended by the author.

The fourth voice is Dickie – and while the move to a rather conventional voice matches Dickie’s much remarked upon bookishness. I did not really feel the storyline worked – telling of Dickie’s move to Trinity to study, a friendship with an eccentric other student Willie (which becomes much deeper over time), the truth behind a traumatic incident when he was apparently struck by a bus on the first day of his third year (note that the book is rather too full of famous incidents which are not what they seem – the truth about the titular event which meant Imelda wore her veil for the entire wedding to cover her swollen eye emerges later on) and then a, for me, rather surprising relationship he forged when he returned.

A fifth section of the book then adopts a stylistically impressive second person voice - and using it switches rapidly around each character as we learn more of the past and see how the present develops: Cass for example now at Trinity, Imelda deciding what to do about the attentions of Mike, Maurice who has returned from Portugal finding holes in the garage accounts, Dickie freed from the garage spending his time with Victor – an eccentric but driven end time prepper who drags Victor into his plans and helps transform a shed on Dickie’s family land (a shed which has different meanings to various of the novel’s characters).

Other characters include a mysterious Polish mechanic who obsessed a number of the family members, Big Mike’s Brazilian housekeeper and sometime lover, Imelda’s ageing seer Aunt Rose (with who she lived for many years) – and at the end - in a sequence which transitions further to be written more like a play - a series of rather unlikely events (at the least in their simultaneity) and part misunderstandings causes pretty well every character to converge on the shed – in a section which I really felt was not a great way to end a literary fiction novel.

Overall for me - as my initial comments said - a book which despite its considerable merit, just failed to either live up to its huge promise or really justify its length.

[P Jane Everett · Rating 1 out of 5]

This pretentious tome drags the reader through 650 pages of stream-of-consciousness maunderings of three spectacularly self centred family members (the parents and the teenage daughter) and the boy that is their ultimate victim. I can’t spoil this rotten mess any more than it already is by telling you by the time the anticlimax arrives and the author puts the entire family in rain soaked woods at night you wonder why he didn’t drop all the other characters in the book into the woods at the same time - I half expected Jimmy Hoffa to be found wandering around banging into trees. And when I say anti climax I really mean it because the book stops seconds before the ending, perhaps because the writer realizes it would expose what a third rate horror ending to which he has dragged his hapless victims ( by that I mean his readers). If you miss one book this year that the critics applauded make it this one.

[Flo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now shortlisted for Booker Prize 2023 - This is my winner. Good luck.

The story of a family whose members are all on the brink of breakdown. I'm not a fan of novels that change the protagonist every 150 pages, but in this case, I found that every new family member managed to be more interesting than the previous one. Despite apparently very little plot, Paul Murray keeps things moving in the right direction. In the end, I knew this is my new favorite from this year's Booker longlist.

[Taufiq Yves · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before reading the second-to-last and last chapters, I found this book rather unremarkable. However, the impact of the final chapter, which consists of only one page, was so sudden and powerful. The tension and intensity of the penultimate chapter were already impressive - unlike the rest of the book, which features long monologues, this part is like a drama with characters quickly switching scenes, all heading towards a stormy night in the forest. I was left wondering which of the two armed characters would shoot and at whom.

Family tragedies have been depicted extensively, but this book introduces a new layer of tragedy. Paul Murray presents the subtle and real gaps between people and the turmoil beneath a seemingly calm surface. Without political unrest or war refugees, others are like hell, while self - imprisonment is also present. Toxic friendships, jealousy, selfishness, cowardice, deceit, and the desperate attempt to cling to anything, regardless of what or who it is, are all explored.

Starting from the first chapter in the present timeline, up to the midnight forest scene, about a year passes. As the story progresses through the alternating perspectives of the four family members, the past is gradually pieced together. Everyone is both a victim and a perpetrator (except PJ, who is truly innocent). Murray’s ability to write such an extreme yet innocent tragedy is impressive. However, I can't help but wonder how a family can fall apart to such an extent without external wounds. Perhaps it is the uncontrollable undercurrent, rushing towards destruction once a small crack forms.

Murray writing is excellent, not with complex words or advanced metaphors, but by straightforwardly conveying character perspectives. The rhythm and style change slightly with each character, especially Imelda's segments, which are written without punctuation, perfectly capturing her unease and lack of sophistication. When writing Cass, it feels like Murray himself went through such a teenage phase - the contradictions, the oscillations, self-loathing, and blind admiration are all incredibly believable.

While reading, I often felt a sense of suffering, witnessing characters standing on the brink of an abyss. Sometimes they fell, sometimes they turned away. The title The Bee Sting seems to be explained in the first chapter - Imelda is stung by a bee on her wedding day, disfiguring her and forcing her to wear a veil, symbolizing life's bee sting pain - momentarily shocking but ultimately trivial, only slightly inconvenient. But the final revelation shows that the bee sting is merely a superficial cover for deep pain. If the cover itself is so unbearable, wouldn't the real end be destruction? And Murray adds, "it is for love. You are doing this for love."

An OK read.

2.8 / 5 stars

[leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

in ‘the bee sting’, the barnes family face financial ruin and grapple with their individual secrets in the aftermath of ireland’s economic collapse. the novel interweaves the perspectives of each family member: dickie, his wife imelda, and their teenage children cass and PJ.

murray employs a distinct voice and format for each character’s chapters, a way to signify their emotional state or personality. this is particularly utilised in imelda’s sections which forgo punctuation completely and instead adopt a stream of consciousness style, representing her emotional turmoil and lack of formal education. this is a decision i’ve seen some reviews criticise the book for, but it really just speaks to murray’s deft at crafting characters. he takes care with his characters, but he also allows them to be messy and cruel and fickle, in essence, he allows them to be human.

the novel poses a warning about what can boil to the surface when secrets and tensions have been pushed down for so long. each character is dealing with how their past decisions and societal pressures are impacting the present lives, all against the backdrop of ireland’s economic and ecological challenges. i was enthralled by every page and i can easily see this novel being lauded as a modern classic, with an ending that will leave you screaming or staring at the wall for a while, depending on the type of person you are.


—————————


WHAT THE FUCK

[Candi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an excellent family drama with superb characterization. One of my favorites of the year so far!

[Pedro · Rating 4 out of 5]

After that ending, I’m really not sure about what to say about this… I mean, the writing was very effective, and the author is clearly very comfortable with different writing styles. Characterisation was insane, and so was dialogue (well done, Paul Murray, because that’s how kids and teens talk. Bravo!)

Also, I don’t think there are a lot of authors out there that can manage to keep the wheels in motion throughout more than six hundred pages whilst jumping from one character’s point of view to another and moving backwards and forwards in time.

Another very impressive thing was the way the story unfolded, and how all the twists and turns and big revelations never stopped coming as a surprise. Oh, and I liked the dark humour too, but have to say that, for me, at no point did this story turn into “ahah” kind of funny.

So, yeah, plenty of things to love about this one, but by the end of the day, it just took a long, long time (and maybe too many coincidences) to get to that pain in the neck of an ending.

[Maxwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize]

Wildly ambitious, perhaps overly long, and full of conceits written in an affectatious tone—this novel surely will not be for every reader.

If you don't like coincidence in the novel, or characters you don't necessarily see eye to eye with, then don't pick this up.

If you're not a fan of stream of consciousness writing or when author's don't use quotations for their characters' dialogue, you might not enjoy this either.

BUT, if you are prepared to go on a crazy ride for 700+ pages (oh yeah, if you don't like chunky books... you get the point), then I can't recommend The Bee Sting enough.

We follow the Barnes family, a once-wealthy Irish quartet who are down on their luck after an economic slump. Dickie, the patriarch, is slowly losing a grip on his car dealership and his sanity. Imelda, his too-gorgeous-for-this-small-town wife is questioning her place in the little world she's created with Dickie. And their two kids, Cass and PJ, are coming into their own, discovering the world's foibles and follies, including those of their own parents.

I loved how much of an adventure this story was. It's not necessarily large in scope, mainly following these four characters over the period of a few months or so in their life. However, the inner lives we explore in each of them is rich and Murray renders their voices and thoughts so vividly on the page. His prose is the kind that you can completely lose yourself in, and it made a 700+ page book hard to put down. Quite a feat.

There's also so much to unpack in this novel thematically. I cannot wait for book club to discuss this because you can look at it in so many ways. A novel about climate change and the state of our world, about discovering your sexuality and identity (and the ways different generations approach this), through marriage and friendships, and so much more.

Like I said, I don't think this will be for every reader. It's definitely giving an Irish Franzen vibe, so if that sounds like your thing, you will likely love it, or at least enjoy the ride.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know a book is phenomenal when you eagerly read 650 pages and even then, you’re saddened that the author didn’t write more. That’s the kind of book The Bee Sting is.

After reading Paul Murray’s prior book, Skippy Dies, I knew I was in for a treat. I just didn’t know how much. At its core is a fable: a weary and cold traveler discovers a door in the side of a hill. Inside there is food, music, conviviality, and a warm welcome. The traveler willingly partakes. But the next day, he wakes up alone and stiff on the side of the hill and can no longer. When he arrives back home, he is dismayed to find his home reduced to a pile of stones and his family dead. While he was diverted by entertainment, a hundred years have gone by an that time cannot be regained.

The Barnes family consists of Dickie, the owner of a Volkswagen dealership, his beautiful wife Imelda, daughter Cass who dreams of college in Dublin with her bestie Elaine, and PJ, who is obsessed with video games and existential threats. The family consistently is haunted by events that reshaped the past, the drama that is upending the present, and issues beyond their control for the future – such as the degradation of “normal” life through climate change. They are alienated from each other and even from themselves. They are also the architects of their own life through choices that can, at any time, reach out and destroy them. Slowly but surely, they are being pushed to that door where everything will change.

Much of what they “put out there” are fables they spin themselves. For instance, the book takes its title from a bee sting that Imelda falls victim to on her way her wedding, forcing her to stay veiled the entire time. At least, that’s what everyone believes. Barnes family members put on their metaphorical veil to shelter themselves, but the outside world, along with its threats, is just a thin layer away. As they unconsciously inch closer and closer to events that will undo them and turn their world into something unrecognizable, the novel escalates in tension and the voices begin to integrate together. The last pages are breathtaking and unforgettable.

This book is short-listed for the Booker Prize and if it doesn’t win, there is no justice. I give it 6 stars and envy those about to embark on its journey.

[Karen · Rating 1 out of 5]

UPDATE:
I should have started this review by stating that I tried reading this book but couldn’t get into it at all. And part of the reason was the story. And the other part of the reason was because of the size of the book. But what my original review focused on was a rant on the size of the book. So, this is my update to that review to explain how I really feel.

I have read many classics and worthy books over the years that have been over 500+ pages that have absolutely captivated me.

I have also felt sad when I closed the last page, feeling I could have stayed with this story with EVEN more pages it was that good to me.

Do you remember Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett? What an epic story that was. Even the Harry Potter stories topped 700 pages sometimes. Did I complain? Not once. I was so in to the magic. And even Les Miserables by Victor Hugo at 1462 pages! As frightening as that was for me, which I re-visited recently. I still was fascinated by the story.

And East of Eden by Steinbeck. 608 pages. So yes. I have read and reviewed them all. And loved them all.

So, I do feel, that there are points when stories come my way, that aren’t that great, and are rather long in pages, that I do have a right to groan and complain about them being too long. And wonder why an author feels the need to be so verbose!

Now on to this book…

I was devastated when my husband brought this book home to me from the library. What? How many pages is this book? 643 pages! I just went through this with “Age of Vice’ by Deepti Kapoor!

And…

“Past Lying” by Val McDermid! Why do these authors have to write these books with so many pages?

“It is for love. You are doing this for love.”

Nope.

I won’t do it for love. I don’t care how beloved this book is. Stop it authors. Stop writing books with so many pages. You can tell your stories thoughtfully in shorter versions that will keep your readers engaged and interested.

I will admit, I wanted to start you. Like “A Covenant of Water” by Abraham Verghese I wanted to give you a chance hoping you might give me the same feels.

But…

Back to the library you go.

BTW, I did really try to read this to see if I would like it. And I didn’t. So, please. Stop the judgments below.

[Mark Porton · Rating 2 out of 5]

CAIRNS POST – 2nd December 2024

Well-known, retired Celebrity Medical Scientist, part-time nude yoga teacher, philanthropist and popular foot model, Mr Mark Porton, appeared in the Cairns District Court today to answer the rarely seen charge of “Overfamiliarity with a Librarian”.

His lawyer, Mr Luigi Fettucine KC, told Judge Badweather AO, “Only 300 pages into this book, and struggling, my client was relieved to receive a notice from the librarian concerned to return The Bee Sting immediately. Upon returning the book, my client hurdled over the counter to express his gratitude at being released from the bondage of this dithering, overly complex, voluminous, YA, hot mess of a book. Not to mention the total absence of punctuation. For the record, it is also worth noting, he developed fulminant ring-worm infestations on his extremities due to the dread of having to pick up or even walk past this 600-page doorstopper".

Witnesses, however, tell a different story. The delusional, and let’s not deny it, overtly stupid, Porton apparently entered the Library – screaming “At last, at last……no more pain, I LOVE YOU!!!!” and after shoving aside and screaming at a small, well behaved group of Kindergarten students (group reading Miffy Goes to the Pantomime), he jumped the counter to hug Chief Librarian Miss Briony Sensibleshoes – and he didn’t let her go for at least 20 minutes while sobbing uncontrollably. The man was happy!"

Miss Sensibleshoes is in Cairns Hospital, recovering from acute and inappropriate hugging syndrome, and Porton is in the Cairns Watch-house awaiting trial. He pleaded innocent.

Associated Press.

[Michael Burke · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Bee Sting” by Paul Murray– a celebrated Irish author, longlisted for this year’s Booker prize (now on the short list!) – of course I had to read it! Then, being 656 pages, I had to wonder what I had committed to. Now the first winner of the Nero Book of the Year Award.

This is a family saga, told from the point of view of four of the household members (at least, initially). The Barnes family is reeling from the economic crash following Ireland’s Celtic Tiger boom. The father, Dickie, runs the family’s car dealership and things are bleak. His wife, Imelda, is introduced as a fashionable beauty who is appalled at her husband’s recent business failures and does not let him forget it. She has resorted to selling off the family’s goods on Ebay. Not only are the finances plummeting– maybe just as importantly– so is their standing in the community. Ever since the days when Dickie’s father, Maurice, succeeded building the business, townsfolk have viewed the family as a bit high and mighty. People are now savoring the fall from grace as the family seems to disintegrate.

The first two sections are told from the children’s viewpoint. We meet Cass, in high school and making her plans to run off to Trinity College in Dublin. Her brother, PJ, is in grade school and is plotting his own runaway escape. While there is great care taken to draw out these characters, the portrayal of the parents, especially the father, seems flat through the children’s eyes.

Once we get to the parents, however, the world starts opening up. Prior to this, the parents seem no more dimensional than a 1950’s television sitcom family. We get the background on Imelda– brought up in a rough childhood and uneducated, she had her heart set on a fairytale future where she was going to be rescued by a Prince Charming. This section of the book is told in a stream-of-consciousness manner, almost completely void of punctuation, in a manner reflecting her lack of education. This might seem annoying at first, but this device effectively relays her moods and emotions.

Up until this point, Dickie scans as a rather bland and ineffectual father figure– boring! His background is quite a bit different than his children are aware of. It seemed he embraced the role of husband, father, and dull businessman while completely abandoning the path his life wanted to run. Daddy has a past. Daddy has secrets.

The characters are wonderful, believable, and easy to sympathize with. As each one tells the story we get details the others are not aware of, much like a “Rashomon.” As the story returns to events we are enlightened– it dawns on us why characters have been acting as they have, in part due to these black holes in the family’s understanding of each other.

There is a fifth section, told in second person. Here we rapidly switch from character to character with Cass now in college, PJ struggling to keep his parents together, Imelda feeling conflicted over an attempted seduction, while Dickie has thrown himself whole-heartedly into converting a family shed into a survivalist / end-of-days shelter for a future catastrophe. A real confrontation builds when a shadowy villain steps forward to force a crucial, life-changing call to action.

Again, a very long book. It moved along quickly for me as the revelations fleshed out the characters and kept my interest. I am conflicted about the final section of the book. I did not like it at first— and I have seen some reviewers openly hostile to the way it was handled. On second reflection, I see what Paul Murray was doing… it was just a little jarring after the careful pinpoint layering upon layering in the bulk of the telling. Still, an excellent read… the character building was brilliant.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and to NetGalley for providing an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review. #TheBeeSting #NetGalley

*** Changing my rating from 4 to 5. I cannot get this book out of my head, and... even at over 650 pages, I want to go back and re-devour it. I love how these characters' stories were sculpted. Probably the best book I read in 2023.

[Cath Delsignore · Rating 2 out of 5]

A five star book but loses three stars

I loved this book, until the ending. Omg the ending ( spoiler alert so don’t read on if you don’t want to know)…
The ending is the biggest disappointment ever. You don’t find out what happens to any of the characters at all- it’s the biggest cliff hanger with SO many unanswered questions. There are side/important characters that literally go nowhere, as in you don’t know what happens to them- Victor, Elaine, Lars, Maurice, Victor. The main characters all converge in a forest in the middle of a torrential downpour with one holding a gun - will he / won’t he - and it literally just ends. Imagine watching a film and it just ends like that? You’d be screaming with disappointment. And that’s how I feel having read to the end. And PJ??? Let me tell you, the most annoying kid ever. And who the bloody hell was Nev and why did he need to hang out with him?? Such a shame as if the author had been more realistic with the ending, it could have been a cracking read

[Ilenia Zodiaco]

3.5 ⭐

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 2 out of 5]

This one felt like a bait-and-switch to me. I picked it up mostly because the Guardian called it the most fun of the books longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, a statement that clearly needed more qualification—this book turns pretty dark, and while apparently some found it funny, it was not for me. But the beginning pulled me in with the promise of a literary, closely-observed family saga, and the early sections, from the points-of-view of the two children—the family’s 17-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son—were excellent. Pitch-perfect, compelling, very realistic about what it’s like to be that age and living in this particular moment. I loved it.

Unfortunately it was downhill from there, and this book being an absurdly unnecessary 643 pages long meant it was a lot of downhill. After the kids’ sections comes the mother’s, which is as long as both of them combined, including a whopping 100-page flashback which is a long way from 100 pages’ worth of interesting and even then hides a couple of key (though again, not that jaw-dropping) events to be revealed even later. Also, Imelda is one of those stock female characters whose entire life consists of the fact that she is beautiful and her relationships with the (mostly male) people around her. (While there are few functional relationships in this book of any sort, the most connection and least toxicity are reserved for male-male or to a lesser extent male-female pairings.) And Murray chooses to represent her lack of education by forgoing punctuation in her sections, which while I got used to it, nonetheless feels contrived (as if consciously punctuating one’s internal monologue were the norm) and lazy (Imelda comes to life far less well than the others, perhaps in part from the author’s assumption that lack of periods and commas somehow reveals her mind).

Then we get the father’s section, which was a bit more interesting than the mother’s, and with a couple of genuine surprises. I was not expecting that rape scene; in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a male author write something like that. The book never fully recovered for me though, and then the final 150 pages are all in the second person, cycling ever more rapidly among the main characters toward an absurdly contrived denouement. I think I understand why the ambiguity of the ending—impending climate change comes up frequently throughout the book, and so presumably Murray leaves the family’s fate hanging in the balance to symbolize where the world stands right now. And I see how it was foreshadowed from the very first sentence. That said, that foreshadowing largely serves to point up the absurdity of the final scene, to me: if this is meant to be a book about what might drive a man to kill his family, as the murderer in the neighboring town did, perhaps it ought to explore what might actually motivate that, rather than how you might contrive a situation where it happens accidentally through a chain of bizarre and unlikely coincidences.

But there’s a lot of melodrama and contrivance and emotional manipulation there at the end, and looking back on the book as a whole, this was going on well before the end; I just find myself less impressed with the whole thing. The characters now seem awfully broad, with everyone outside the family being one-note, mostly unpleasant and manipulative, and even the leads generally defined by a couple of traits. In retrospect the father is pretty much a caricature of a gay man, and the mother was a caricature of a shallow woman all along. The kids are better and feel more real, particularly the son; I was annoyed that Murray couldn’t give the daughter a single female friend or potential friend without sexual attraction being involved. The two non-Irish characters are particularly flat and stereotypical: the sexy Brazilian babe and the villainous Polish hunk. (I have no idea if making villainous hunks Polish in particular is a stereotype in common circulation, but “villainous foreign hunk” seems like a pretty universal one.)

So, while this initially seemed promising, in the end I can’t recommend it. It never justifies the unusual length and didn’t deliver the strong character work I expected either.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5
I love Irish books and authors.
This is a big book….many mixed reviews. It’s not for everyone.
The story is about a family of four ,in a rural town outside Dublin in modern times.
Dikie, Imelda, and the children Cass and P.J.
This touches on many topics of what they are all going through personally and what’s going on in society.
It ends up being a real Irish tragedy.
I read somewhere where this book has a terrific frenetic energy, and that is spot on!

[Cheri · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Stars

This is one that won’t appeal to all, although there are moments that are relatable, as well as captivating, overall I think this is one that many will love, and some will not. The length, a little over 650 pages, will put some people off, which is a shame.

This is a story of family, and so much more than that including love, marriage, death, loss, abuse, and an effort that goes into promises we make to ourselves - to be a better person, the kind we’d like to think that we are, or are at least capable of being. There’s also an aspect of this which seems to weave in and out of the story of a coming apocalypse, and prepping for the end of days.

The crash that left many families in financial distress in 2008 has left this family on the edge of losing everything. They are barely hanging on to the business that Dickie, the father, owns. His wife, Imelda, is prodding him to go to his father to help them out. His teenage daughter, Cass, is - like most teenagers - is going through the things many teen girls go through, while her brother, PJ is going through a growing spurt, and nothing fits him anymore.

This dark comedy covers several themes that don’t feel connected as this begins, but come together as the story continues. It strives to cover and connect these lives of these people who seem pretty determined to set themselves apart from each other. At times - to me - if felt disconnected, and I questioned how these various people’s stories were going to connect, but eventually, it all merges into one unforgettable story.


Pub Date: 15 Aug 2023

Many thanks for the ARC provided by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

[Jessica Woodbury · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adored this. Apparently this book came out two years ago but I only heard about it last year. Regardless, I'm so glad I found my way to it and then back to it after putting it down initially. The length is daunting, I decided to read it on audio and this was a great decision.

Such a sneaky book, it really wormed its way into my heart so slowly. It does what it says it's going to do, gets into the heart of one particular dysfunctional family, but the way it opens up took me by surprise. After starting the book following teenage Cass and tween PJ, I thought I had a pretty good handle on this family. And then the section following mother Imelda just broke me wide open, showed me just how much I didn't know, all the intricacies under the surface that the children never see. And how much it went beyond just not understanding details of your parents' lives. And then when we got to father Dickie, I at least knew that this book would probably once again open up this character but this time I thought I was prepared, thought I probably had an idea of who he was. And once again just a heartbreaker. Followed by a finale with like five more heartbreakers.

Just the way Murray opens up these characters, shows you the surface, then what's beneath, then takes us back to all of their interactions where we can see all of it--what they show, what they hide--I can't remember the last time I saw switching characters used this effecitvely in a novel. It has started to feel like just a trick domestic thrillers use but here Murray gives a masterclass.

Feels like the kind of book you could recommend to all kinds of readers, you just have to make space for its high page count. And believe me I get that that isn't always a small ask. But this book really paid off, enjoyed it just immensely. Made me believe in what the novel is capable of.