I finished The Bee Sting only because it was on the Booker Prize Short List for 2023 and I’m trying to get them read before November 26, the date the winner is announced. Again, I wasn’t any too happy with it for a number of reasons and imo it’s the weakest on the Short List. That how Murray’s 2005 Short Listed book Skippy Dies (2005) (only the 1st couple paragraphs of my review on this link, but it’s still there) was and I was disappointed with that, too. 

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The Bee Sting
By Paul Murray 
2023/ (738 pages per Amazon) 
Narrated by a cast 26h 10m
Rating:  7 / 21st Century Irish Lit 
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Here’s my very brief spoiler-free intro to the plot, characters, structure, writing style, etc.  There are a lot of reviews online if you want to peek at them, but I don’t look except to see very generally “what it’s about” until after I read the book.  

The main characters of this contemporary Irish tragic-comedy are the Bankes family of four who live in a small city outside of Dublin, Ireland. Dickie and Imelda are the parents of Cass and TJ who are ages 18 and 12 (?). Frankie’s own father is still a part of the family, but his mother and older brother, Frank, are deceased.  Imelda’s only family-of-origin contact is Rosa, an older housekeeper. Dickie operates his dad’s car dealership while Imelda, his wife, stays home worrying, shopping, fixing her make-up and gossiping. The past haunts her. The future is catching up with Dickie.  Most of the plot concerns those two. Cass studies for exams and college with her best friend Elaine while TJ plays video games with his buddies.  Everyone is on their phones a lot. The dealership has been having rough times since the recession of 2008 and since Dickie took over.

We get the individual point of view of each family member in their 1st, 2nd and 3rd person narratives.  The 2nd person is usually talking to himself or thinking. For example, “He won’t call at all! But you know that he will. And when he does, what will you tell him then?” 

The structure is loosely chronological and it alternates between the main characters plus a couple more. Also the narrative switches in and out of flash-backs when the character is remembering something. The flash-backs are sometimes several pages long. 

On top of that the story moves from the separate childhoods of Dickie, Emelda, Cass and TJ to the current time (2023?), but it doesn’t do that chronologically so we find out in Chapter 25 why (someone) was acting like that in Chapter 12.  It’s like 4 jigsaw puzzles, lightly sorted. 

The plus side this book has excellent character development. Murray is a master of the skill. Except for the minor characters, these folks are so well-drawn, detailed, alive, and complex they seem to breathe,    

Also although it doesn’t really get going until at least half way through the book, the tension builds smoothly with perfectly placed twists to give the reader a good jolt.          

Okay – all that good stuff – what went wrong?   It starts out very slow. Chapter 1 is long and very much about the teens, Cassie and her best friend  Elaine, plus TJ, Cassie’s younger brother. There are bits about the parents and a few other adults but it’s basically social commentary for too many pages, dwelling on how parents affect their children in the teenage years and vice versa.  (I’m reminded of Jonathan Franzen here – long books concerned with the social issues affecting the generations of a family or two.) 

The Barnes family, previously quite prosperous, is having serious financial problems and their children are scared and ashamed. Cassie and her best friend Elaine are both very bright but they’re growing up in an age of pot and sex and iPhones and so on – it’s distracting – lol.  TJ and his friends are learning, with their own timing, about girls and so on.  But it’s the parents who have the real problems with money (like bankruptcy) and sex (and infidelity). And then there’s Morris, (Dave’s father who set up the auto dealership decades prior) comes to town to be honored. This is an embarrassment to his son who inherited the car lot which is going broke (2008 recession or not).  

A few paragraphs into Chapter 2 the book seemed to look up, promising some magical realism or light post-modernism anyway. A fairy tale originally told by Rosa, but retold by Imelda seems meaningful to The Bee Sting as a whole, but Murray’s novel is so long and complex plot-wise, I don’t remember what the traveling man, locked door and fairies was about!  There are other dreams in the book, this is a literary device which I just personally don’t much care for.

I’ll be finishing the Booker Prize Short List this week. Other than Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, which is not even available to me except in paper versions, I have only one book to go and then I’ll see if I can make a guess as to which will win. Meanwhile I’ll read a novella and relax for a bit.