Book review | 2023 Booker Prize-Longlisted The Bee Sting by Paul Murray is a spellbinding tale of an Irish family in free fall

Irish author Paul Murray and his 2023 Booker-longlisted novel.

Unless you are an ardent fan of comic literature, there’s a fair chance that you haven’t heard of the Irish author Paul Murray. Twenty years ago, his debut novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, a witty satire about an impoverished aristocratic layabout who is forced to look for a job, struck readers and critics as one of the standout comedies of its time. This year, his fourth and latest novel, The Bee Sting, is on the Booker longlist and there is a fair chance that it will make it to the top six. However, the humour that has been a hallmark of Murray’s writing is sparing. This dark tale will break your heart.

Set in an Irish town, ‘where people slowed down their cars to see who you were so that they could wave to you,’ The Bee Sting is about a family of four, the Barneses. In a neat bit of foreshadowing, it begins thus: ‘In the next town over, a man had killed his family. He’d nailed the doors shut so that 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.’ In the dreary months following the financial crash, this event that has got everyone talking, including Cass Barnes, a bright teenager, in her last  school year, and her best friend Elaine who is thinking of entering the Miss Universe Ireland contest. Cass is obsessed with Elaine, who, clearly is the dominant one in the relationship. Elaine, in turn is fascinated by Cass’s mother, Imelda. A famous blonde-haired, green-eyed beauty, Imelda is a compulsive shopper, and, in her brainy daughter’s view, an airhead. On the surface of it, the lives of  Cass and Elaine are similar — Brazilian housekeepers, shopping in New York, vacationing on the Cap d’Antibes, dreams of going to Trinity College together. But below this halcyon existence, there is trouble brewing in the house of Barnes.

Dickie Barnes, Cass’s dad, runs a car showroom and garage, a family business started by his father. Maurice Barnes Motors has been as hard hit by the recession, as it is by Dickie’s patent inability to run it. ‘Someone would come in looking for a new car, and he would steer them towards a used one. If they wanted a used one, he’d push them in the direction of a smaller, cheaper model. More than once, she’d heard him talk people out of buying cars altogether.’ One of the reasons for Dickie’s disinterest in selling cars is Cass’s school project on climate change: it involved calculating how much greenhouse gas would be released by the cars he sold. The answer had a life changing effect. Much to Imelda’s chagrin, Dickie has turned vegetarian, started cycling to work and worrying about how to future-proof his family from the impending environmental collapse, a fear substantiated by the flood, when three weeks’ rain falls in a single day. The fourth, and the most endearing, member of this family is PJ, a twelve-year-old whose very normal interests — video games,  collecting fun facts about nature, listing the "Top Ten Reasons Cass is a Bitch", and secretly stalking the gorgeous Elaine on Instagram, are offset by the grim atmosphere at home, the even grimmer bullying at school, the painful blisters on his feet caused by wearing shoes that are now too small and the mysterious friend on social media who invites him to Dublin.

While teenage troubles dominates the first chapters of the novel, they also show how the children react to the widening spaces within the family. The fights are caused by the severe cash crunch, seemingly, due to the slowdown. As Imelda eBays her possessions and nags Dickie to seek help from his rich father, Cass feels as if she’s been ‘buried under her parent’s lives, their failures, their unhappiness,’ and wants to escape. Doing well in the school leaving exams, and winning a scholarship is her route, but Elaine’s somewhat toxic influence propels her towards drinking and a dubious acquaintance, a handsome Polish mechanic, Ryszard.

Teenage angst, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. In subsequent chapters, the perspectives shift and the back stories of the parents, Imelda and Dickie, emerge, showing the reader how each of them contributed to the derailment of the family.

The chapters dealing with Imelda’s traumatic childhood, written in a punctuation-free, stream of consciousness style that works surprisingly well, catalogue the events of her life — a chaotic home and a domineering father, an aspiration to escape poverty, falling in love with the town’s football hero whose family is posh and well-off, the terrible accident that led her to marry his brother, the bee that stung her on the face just before the church ceremony. Is she a shameless gold digger or a young woman  in mourning, desperately seeking to reconnect with her dead boyfriend? Building credible, life like characters — adults, children — and stripping them down to their bare bones, is a skill that Murray has completely mastered. In Dickie Barnes, we meet a man for whom manhood, or whatever constitutes the accepted notion of it, is in itself a combat zone. His relationship with his father, who clearly favoured his flamboyant younger brother, is tenuous; his quiet bookish nature takes him away from a real understanding of the world of business; in the past, he was the victim of a terrible assault; he had a homosexual relationship that was abandoned when family duty took priority, the reemergence of longing for that lost love. In short, the novel is a long, sorry saga of decisions that turn out badly for Dickie and Imelda. Again, entirely plausible. As misfortune upon misfortune piles up on the Barnes family, the suspense keeps the reader going through the 650-plus pages. Yes, it’s probably the longest book you’ll read this year. Nevertheless, it’s a sharp portrayal of our times. Ergo, a must-read.