The Bee Sting

Every so often a book comes along that grabs you by the shoulders and shakes. The Bee Sting is that book. For writers, it’s a master class in character building. For readers, it’s a wonderfully entertaining exploration of humanity’s endless contradictions.

At its most simple, the novel is an epic family saga. The Barnes family is falling apart. Dickie’s Volkswagon dealership is failing and he’s now spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade survivalist. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewelry on eBay and half-heartedly dogging the attention of fast-talking Big Mike, while their teenage daughter Cass is binge drinking her way through school and questioning life’s futility. As for twelve-year-old PJ, he’s on the brink of running away to Dublin where he’s caught up online with a “friend” he’s never met.
 
At the center is a fable, a fairy tale about fairy folk, recalled by Imelda Barnes, wife of Dickie, mother of Cass and PJ. Imelda herself was once a kind of fairy tale, the penniless beauty who married into a wealthy family, but the Barneses have fallen on hard times thanks to the recession. Now she recalls the fable, told to her by her mysterious aunt — “a warning,” Imelda thinks, “before either of them knew there was anything to warn about.”

In the story, a weary traveler, stuck outside on a cold night, discovers a door in the side of a hill, and on the other side of the door, a great banquet hall filled with food and drink and music and fair-haired, blue-eyed folk who, when they see the traveler, “let out a cheer as if they have been waiting for him before they begin.” The traveler eats and drinks and dances, and when he wakes the next morning, cold and stiff on the side of the hill, he sees no sign of the door. And later that day he arrives at his village to find it all changed, his house a pile of stones, his wife and children long dead—for while he danced and drank, a hundred years went by, never to be regained.

I found myself puzzling over this story, one that might smack of the particular flavor of leprechauns and blarney that actual Irish people call Oirishness. It sticks out in this determinedly modern novel, one whose characters are focused on money and college and video games and climate change, from a determinedly modern Dublin novelist, whose career seems devoted to an unsentimental, unclichéd portrait of his country. And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about this poor traveler, who finds after one whirling dance that his home is forever unfamiliar to him. You have to imagine him roaming the countryside, wondering where the world he once knew had gone.

The Barnes family spends a lot of time wondering what happened to the past—that is, when they’re not stewing in their present, or being terrified about the future.

The characters struggle to disentangle their human-scale drama from larger, existential terrors: the recession that might never end; the murderer in the town next door; the hundred-year flood that tears through the village. “Nothing mattered!” Cass tells herself when, instead of studying for exams, she spends her nights hooking up with gross men in the worst of the local pubs. “Everything was coming to an end, everything was closing down, everything had been carried off in the flood.” Later, Dickie, consumed with “future-proofing” his home, reflects on that flood and the hundred-year drought that followed, and wonders: “Maybe that’s how it will go—instead of one definitive cataclysm, a series of ‘anomalies,’ each time lasting longer, with the stretches of what you call normal life becoming further and further apart, until one day it dawns on you that this is normal life now.” That’s a chilling premonition of how civilization might degrade thanks to climate change, but also a pretty apt description of what it’s like becoming an adult.

The Barnes family, too, is suffering its own series of anomalies—Cass’ drinking, PJ’s plans for running away, both parents catching the eyes of someone else—until the family also finds their world changed, unrecognizable. On Dickie’s desk at the dealership he keeps a Christmas photo of the Barneses at an amusement park five or six years before, the kids small, everyone happy, “even though PJ had got sick on the Crazy Cups.” The gulf between then and now seems unbridgeable.

​Murray’s family epic alternates points of view every hundred pages or so, each family member getting his or her say. The twist is that the voices diverge according to character: Some sections are in first person, some in third, some present tense, some past. Imelda’s sections are written in a Joycean flood that follows the torrent of her ever-streaming thoughts. The narrative dives back into the past, to the two oft-told stories that seem to have definitively turned the Barnes parents’ lives in different directions: the time Dickie, off at college in Dublin, was struck by a car and had to return home; and their wedding day, when Imelda, stung by a bee, kept her veil down through the ceremony to hide her swollen eye. Secrets about the past and the present are revealed, even as the family members grow more and more distant from one another.
 
But we know that they’ll find their way back together somehow, and indeed, the novel’s machinery sends them hurtling back toward one another at novel’s end, though not in the way you might expect or hope. In that final deluge, the book’s voices alternate in an accelerating flurry, and it might take you a few pages to notice: Murray’s writing them all in second person now. The characters are all “you.”
 
The Bee Sting will stay with you long after the final page. You will find yourself remembering certain phrases that had you laugh out loud, or a scene that will break your heart. You will want to read them over and over and wish that you could create a world of characters half as fascinating as the Barnes. This is what a good book is. Even at 650 pages!
 
In the meantime, happy reading.
Joni