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A review by kimbofo
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
5.0
Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting is a spellbinding tragicomic tale that explores the emotional and financial outfall of the 2008 economic crash on one well-to-do Irish family.
It comes in at a stonking 645 pages of small print text, but the story is so perfectly structured and paced that it didn’t feel at all baggy or over-written.
Even the significance of the title is pitch-perfect. It not only refers to an actual bee sting that happens in the book, but when you say it out loud, several times in quick succession, it becomes “beasting”, a term that has multiple meanings but generally implies harsh treatment.
The story is told in the third person through the eyes of four members of the comfortably well-off Barnes family: Cass, the teenage daughter, who is in her last year of secondary school and destined to study literature at Trinity University; PJ, her younger brother, who is obsessed with video games
Imelda, the mother, who is renowned for her beauty and loves to shop; and Dickie, who runs a lucrative Volkswagen dealership originally set up by his own father (now retired and living in Portugal) which is now likely to go under.
Each character’s voice is distinctive and their reactions to the family’s change in circumstances are expertly fleshed out in hefty but compulsively readable sections. Their backstories are explored in such a vivid and deeply compassionate way that each character feels flesh-and-blood real.
As the focus moves from character to character, following their missteps and bad decision-making along the way, we gain a more rounded perspective of the family and come to understand why each person is the way they are.
Threaded throughout the overarching narrative are additional story strands involving subsidiary characters, including a charming but dangerous Polish man who befriends Cass and ends up being hired at her father’s garage; Victor, a conspiracy theorist handyman, who helps Dickie convert a stone cabin in the woods into an apocalypse-proof bunker; Mike, a local businessman and womaniser, who sets his sights on bedding Imelda; and Rose, Imelda’s aunt who has “second sight” but refuses to tell a teenage Imelda her future — probably because she knows it’s not a happy one.
Murray also seamlessly weaves in a catalogue of contemporary issues including climate change, online risks for minors, sexual assault, blackmail, identity politics, childhood poverty, materialism and consumerism, binge drinking and alcoholism, and gangster-related crime.
The result is a hugely ambitious and immersive novel, one that comes right out of the Jonathan Franzen school of storytelling.
For a more detailed review, please visit my blog.
It comes in at a stonking 645 pages of small print text, but the story is so perfectly structured and paced that it didn’t feel at all baggy or over-written.
Even the significance of the title is pitch-perfect. It not only refers to an actual bee sting that happens in the book, but when you say it out loud, several times in quick succession, it becomes “beasting”, a term that has multiple meanings but generally implies harsh treatment.
The story is told in the third person through the eyes of four members of the comfortably well-off Barnes family: Cass, the teenage daughter, who is in her last year of secondary school and destined to study literature at Trinity University; PJ, her younger brother, who is obsessed with video games
Imelda, the mother, who is renowned for her beauty and loves to shop; and Dickie, who runs a lucrative Volkswagen dealership originally set up by his own father (now retired and living in Portugal) which is now likely to go under.
Each character’s voice is distinctive and their reactions to the family’s change in circumstances are expertly fleshed out in hefty but compulsively readable sections. Their backstories are explored in such a vivid and deeply compassionate way that each character feels flesh-and-blood real.
As the focus moves from character to character, following their missteps and bad decision-making along the way, we gain a more rounded perspective of the family and come to understand why each person is the way they are.
Threaded throughout the overarching narrative are additional story strands involving subsidiary characters, including a charming but dangerous Polish man who befriends Cass and ends up being hired at her father’s garage; Victor, a conspiracy theorist handyman, who helps Dickie convert a stone cabin in the woods into an apocalypse-proof bunker; Mike, a local businessman and womaniser, who sets his sights on bedding Imelda; and Rose, Imelda’s aunt who has “second sight” but refuses to tell a teenage Imelda her future — probably because she knows it’s not a happy one.
Murray also seamlessly weaves in a catalogue of contemporary issues including climate change, online risks for minors, sexual assault, blackmail, identity politics, childhood poverty, materialism and consumerism, binge drinking and alcoholism, and gangster-related crime.
The result is a hugely ambitious and immersive novel, one that comes right out of the Jonathan Franzen school of storytelling.
For a more detailed review, please visit my blog.