The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
The Barnes family is in trouble.
Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under – but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewellery on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attentions of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way to her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ, in debt to local sociopath ‘Ears’ Moran, is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.
The present is in meltdown, but the causes lie deep in the past. If you wanted to change this story, how far back would you have to go? To the car crash twelve months before Cass was born? To the infamous bee sting which ruined Imelda’s wedding day? All the way back to Dickie at ten years old, trembling before his father in the garden, learning how to be a real man?
Is it possible that a single moment of bad luck set in motion everything that came after? And does that mean the fate of the Barnes family is already sealed? They are facing a reckoning. If they can’t change the past, or rewrite the story they have already lived, is it too late for a happy ending?
Review – 8/10
This is a sprawling family drama filled with chaos and insanity, tragedy and comedy. Four lives related by blood, yet distanced by circumstance, history and viewpoint.
It is quite long (almost 650 pages in hardback) but it doesn’t really feel it because it constantly confounds your expectations, often by applying truth to a situation where you had expected a cliché or for sensible realisation to overcome cheap or gimmicky plotting.
And the writing is fabulous. The protagonists have their own literary style and Murray has fun with this. The way he’s structured the book is clever too, as it slowly and thoroughly introduces us to each of the main characters and their foibles and then accelerates by switching from one to the other faster and faster until the climax is almost unbearably quickfire and tense.
Once I had settled in to Murray’s writing I thought it was almost magically skilful how I could understand with absolute certainty that he meant one thing even though the text said the exact opposite.
It’s also very funny in places and made me laugh quite unexpectedly: “And yet when you look at her looking at you all kinds of words come into your head – words like minge.”