Book review: Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting a rich but melodramatic account of a disintegrating family

The Bee Sting

By Paul Murray
Fiction/Hamish Hamilton/Paperback/643 pages/$36.39/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3PBt13J)
4 stars

The precarity of a family is given a relentless dissection here by Irish novelist Paul Murray, as he finds various ways to make four members of the Barnes family squirm, creating an operatic tragedy in which there are moments of suspense, although there is also too much melodrama.

In a small Irish town, Cass, preparing for university, enjoys the carefree life of being rich.

Her greatest – and increasingly only – obsession is her friendship with narcissistic classmate Elaine, until the financial crash scuppers her father’s motor business and her mother, a local beauty, is forced to sell her clothes online.

Cass’ 12-year-old brother, PJ, is disturbed by the deteriorating relationship between father Dickie and mother Imelda, and attempts to fix things well beyond his capacity to understand.

Self-ostracising by spending his holidays in the dark woods behind the family house, his isolation becomes dangerous: a schoolmate who insists Dickie cheated his father of money threatens to live-stream beating PJ with a hammer; an online “friend” in whom PJ seeks solace entices him to travel to Dublin with promises of a new car and video games.

This tense beginning of the Barnes family’s unravelling (or were the seeds of destruction planted further back, Murray asks) is set up excellently in the first two sections, written immersively from the perspectives of the two adolescent children.

Murray does a sagacious job of making girlhood and its attendant jealousies and queer ambiguities a serious, insidious force of destruction – the betrayals and the mutual daring which have been the source of such psychological dramas as Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides (1993) and Carol Morley’s 2014 film The Falling.

PJ’s voice, meanwhile, is distinctive, tender in its naivete and pitiable in its dedication to science as certainties crumble around him.

So it is with disappointment that the following section from the point-of-view of Imelda unfortunately dithers, as Murray experiments with stream-of-consciousness writing to reflect Imelda’s troubled mind – used to such great effect in bursts in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Trust (2022) by Hernan Diaz.

Here, it is so tiresome that less patient readers may feel the urge to skip forward.

It does not help that, unlike the other characters, Imelda’s struggles are mainly situated in the past.

At the point of the reader’s encounter with her, she is already mostly in a state of imperturbable placidity, a “ghost A leftover from another life A remnant of something that was no more”. It takes a generous heart to pity her.

The fourth voice, Dickie’s, restores interest with its story of repressed sexuality and impotent manhood, before Murray ratchets up the tension by alternating the four viewpoints in ever quicker succession so that at one point, it more resembles a play. 

The effective foreshadowing and pervasive danger that Murray pipes into the narrative all build to a satisfying climax, taking place in the woods to which Dickie has increasingly relegated himself to construct a bunker for “future proofing”.

As the Barnes family unit disintegrates, Murray challenges readers to search for the original sin, an enterprise that he repeatedly undermines with references to droughts and floods caused by uncontrollable climate change.

It is the most interesting element of the book, as the environment apparently mirrors the fate of the Barnes family.

The different characters relate to nature in different ways, whether as an excuse for transgressions, a strange connection with the hunted squirrels in the woods or a loving memory of father-daughter bonding.

Murray packs his narrative with rich nature imagery, such as the mating patterns of bees and a foreshadowing black dog. 

There is also, this reader suspects, a reference to the age-old dichotomy of nature versus nurture, as Murray implicitly questions if the characters could have acted any differently because of who they are.

A character declares: “History’s just a pair of knickers. Pull’ em off and what do you find? Nature... and it’s absolutely filthy.” 

In creating a story of absolute disaster, where everything expected to go wrong ends up worse, Murray – for good or bad – ridicules any sense of control people might feel over their own fates.

If you like this, read: Trust by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead Books, 2022, $23.83, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3PT5ooU), a similarly patchwork story and literary puzzle of an unconventional couple plagued with troubles after the Great Depression.