To be completely frank, Paul Murray’s THE BEE STING is a challenging read, but it’s a challenge that pays off spectacularly. Murray is an Irish writer influenced by fellow Irishman James Joyce: in this large, complex and ultimately devastating novel about the rise and fall of the Barnes family, Murray plays with form, structure and point-of-view, using stream of consciousness at one point in the narrative, switching to the “you” voice at a key dramatic moment, and crashing the points-of-view of major characters together during the novel’s wild climax. All this technical play is in service to a powerful, highly engaging story: as the economy of Ireland continues to struggle after the 2008 financial crash, Dickie Barnes’s car business is faltering and he’s building a bunker in the forest behind his house in case the world ends. His teenage daughter Cass drinks her way through evaluations for university admisson, his 12-year-old son PJ plans to run away from home and wife Imelda mourns the loss of the high life, wondering why her husband isn’t talking to her. Murray expertly takes us back two decades to tell the story of Imelda and Dickie’s tricky relationship and reveals many past secrets that complicate the present. The book’s large scope and scale makes room for not only a tangled multi-decade domestic drama but also a dazzling literary tour de force that takes on climate change, economic distress, social media, class, identity, desire and the amazing complexities of being alive.

I'm not a fan of long books and this 700 pager was a slow burn. This slow burn however does eventually start to pick up speed until the very end when I was completely blown away, so stick with it. This is the story of the Barnes family and takes place in a small town in Ireland. Imelda, the mother, comes from a dysfunctional single parent family. Dickie, the father, although went to university in Dublin, was groomed to be in charge of the family car dealership. Cass, the daughter, is a typical angsty teenager, longing to leave her small town and find herself. Lastly, PJ, the tween son who is a good hearted kid that always seems to be in some kind of trouble. The first part of this story goes into each of the characters in depth. Each member of the family is keeping secrets and this complete lack of communication between them appears that it will be the ruin of them all, as individuals and as a family. The ending is jaw dropping. This is the kind of book that will stick with me for a very long time. I absolutely loved it!

"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.

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 date – 8/15/23

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.

The character development is absolutely phenomenal in The Bee Sting. It is rare to read a book where the characters are so fully realized, to the point that their actions at the thrilling end don't come as a surprise and yet the emotional impact is not dulled. There were multiple points in the story where I was unsettled by the events unfolding for a character to the point I was holding my breath. The Bee Sting is a slow burn.

I just finished this book and am sitting here stunned by Paul Murray's brilliance.
To describe the plot would, by no means, do it justice. To describe it as the unraveling of an Irish family after the Crash merely outlines the trauma and tragedy a family experiences.
The writing is phenomenal. The book needs to be digested and will stick with me indefinitely as I absorb all that it is about. The story is so potent. Each individual Barnes family member c0uld have been the focus of a book but to have them intertwined in the way they were, was incredible.
The book was truly staggering. What a triumph!

The Bee Sting will leave you wanting to quit reading because you are not sure that you can top this book. It is truly a masterpiece.

The Bee Sting is a mesmerizing epic that I've thought about ever since I finished its final page. Paul Murray weaves the lives of his characters together so seamlessly!

What an expensive story. Each of the members of the Barnes family could have their own full novel, but in the Bee Sting we see such in depth looks at each of them woven together masterfully. so many times this one took my breath away and ripped my heart out. Absolutely stunning.

For the Barnes family, life is not what they expected. As the family's car dealership is on the precipice of failure. But Dickie, the dealership's manager, seems more focused on building a bunker in their backyard than trying to save it. His wife, Imelda, also seems to have largely given up, selling her jewelry for money and spending more time with Big Mike, a local cattle farmer. Their daughter seems to have given up on school, and their son spends much of his time online preparing to run away from home. On the verge of individual and collective crisis, the novel explores the ways they have all become estranged from one another and what led them there.

This is a powerful, complex, and insightful story. It explores interesting ideas about how well one can know even the closest people in their lives, the internal struggles everyone is dealing with, the pull of the desire for connection, and the impacts of family expectations.

Highly recommended.

Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies (2010) represented a high watermark in modern tragicomic fiction and his latest The Bee Sting picks up that baton with grace and energy.

After 2015’s The Mark and the Void, a pleasant and moving (though far more cryptic) dive into metafiction, The Bee Sting represents a return to expected territory for Murray though not without new wrinkles and lessons picked up from the former title.

Black comedy, numb tragedy, family drama/trauma, high school, and years of oppression - it’s all here. Highly recommended for fans of Murray’s prior work, epic family sagas, and the fact that all the comedies on tv are about depression these days.

This is the first book I have read by Murray. My initial thoughts as I started reading this were that it was too long. However, as I read further into the novel, I realized I was in the hands of a master who was perfectly pacing his story. I appreciate the lengthy sections that follow each character in hindsight. Those sections really help to allow the reader to become familiar with his characters. I also loved that the chapter switched to being shorter at the end of the novel--mirroring the dramatic action. Plus, the foreshadowing throughout the novel is fantastic--something I only really realized after finishing and discussing the book with others who have read it. This is truly a fantastic novel and I will be seeking out more Paul Murray.

In the hands of a less talented writer The Bee Sting's length and format may not have worked at all but Paul Murray is a gifted storyteller who weaves detailed, very human stories from the lives of this dysfunctional family. Arguably the same story could have been told in half the length but for readers wanting to be entertained by the multilayered stories and sharp-witted observations and nuances of these lives the journey will be an enjoyable one.
Ambiguous endings will always divide readers' opinions but here an earlier conversation which Imelda had with Rose hints at the outcome and I'm glad not to have had the aftermath of the situation spelled out in detail.
The formatting of the text towards ending (at least in the Kindle edition) was a little difficult to follow and I found the lack of punctuation in Imelda's chapters distracting.
I'm very keen to go back to Murray's earlier works. My thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for an advance review copy

So many of the bad things that happen in the world come from people pretending to be something they’re not."

The ending was terrible and it could have been half the length

This book was just too long and tedious. I think this novel would've been better if it was trimmed by 40%. I just don't have the time and energy to read such a bloated and pretentious book.

Paul Murray's THE BEE STING is a family saga Masterpiece of originality. Although the plot takes place in Ireland, it can be anywhere. Brilliant characterizations which holds your interest from beginning to end. The last part of the book is hard to put down. One thinks one is watching a movie as it builds to a chilling climax. What more can be said! Read it and discuss with your book groups. Perfect.

Loved this long but engaging family novel, all the way to its cinematic but ambiguous ending.. Will go back and read Skippy Dies.

*Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC of "The Bee Sting" by Paul Murray.

Did I love most of this book? Yes. Was it incredibly (and IMHO unnecessarily) long + a little slow in certain paints? Also yes. I tricked myself into reading this one because I had a digital copy on my Kindle, and I didn't look up the page count before starting. When I began to feel like I was making little to no progress in how much of the book I read (love that handy % counter in the corner), I decided to check, and woweee! 650 pages, which very well could make it the longest book I've ever read.

That being said, "The Bee Sting" is, as another reviewer put it, an "extraordinary story about the derailing of a once prosperous family." While it was sometimes hard to follow (and there were some characters I cared decidedly less about than others), I thoroughly enjoyed following this family and their friends around their small Irish town—and occasionally to Dublin and back. Murray has a unique way of weaving each person together, past and present. I also didn't love the ending (though I might have just been incredibly keen to be done with this very long book and get to start a new one).

I tried this twice, because I LOVED "Skippy Dies." I read 30%, which in a book of this length is quite a lot. I kept waiting to get to the point where I couldn't stop reading, but that never happened, so I can stop reading.

Set in a small town in Ireland this modern day story finds the Barnes family in trouble.
Dickie’s auto sales and repair business is loosing it’s reputation and going bankrupt. His secret past is coming back to haunt him. Dickie’s stunningly beautiful wife Imelda comes from an abusive family and has been addicted to buying the finer things in life. She resents having to sell her possessions to try to keep the family afloat. Teenage daughter Cass is in her senior year of high school and at the top of her class. She’s drinking out of control, doing drugs and having plenty of sex. Pre-teen son PJ’s best friend no longer wants to hangout. PJ’s being bullied and determined to run away from home and meet up with his online friend Ethan whom he has never met. This story has a slow start that picks up speed as it gets deeper into the lives of these four characters. The ending quickly hurls the reader to it’s conclusion. Don’t be distracted by the lack of punctuation in parts of this book, they are intentional and very effective. I was not sure how I felt about this story when I finished it. As I reflect on it I think that because of the length of the book (656 pages) it may not be for everyone but overall if you stick with it, it’s going to be very well received.
This ARC was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Difficult book for me to rate. Based on the first third of the book, I would have given it four stars. The writing style is compelling, though sometimes confusing about whose perspective and timeframe are being discussed. Then the book got slow for me in the middle third. The end of the book was the most frustrating and confusing part - suspenseful so that I really wanted to finish it, while at the same time resenting how long it was taking to get to the end. It is a long book. Good character development and excellent insight into the characters' mindset and motives. Nevertheless, it was too long and too wacky at the end. Talented author but needs to learn how to tell his story with fewer words.