The Bee Sting: Ghosts of the past haunt family in generational Irish drama

PEOPLE and dreams die, but never truly leave in Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, his fourth novel and his second to be nominated for the Booker prize after 2010’s Skippy Dies.

In this expansive portrait of an Irish family over 40 years, these ghosts carry the lies the family tell each other and themselves. The novel charts how they upend the Barnes’ seemingly perfect lives in a small town, but The Bee Sting transcends mere family drama.

The novel opens up like a series of Russian dolls through an in-depth and artfully constructed dive into each character’s psyche, taking on large and complex themes like the climate crisis and changing views on gender and sexuality in Catholic Ireland. 

The story centres on the Barneses, a rich but provincial Irish family. Dickie is the owner of a once-thriving car dealership inherited from his father, but the business is now struggling due to circumstance and his own mismanagement. His wife Imelda, beautiful and insecure, cannot cope with the consequent fall in her standard of living and the family’s social position, and begins to fight with him endlessly. 

The bickering and the family’s climb-down from the top of their small town’s economic ladder also wrecks the lives of their children, Cassandra and PJ. Cass sees her plans to go to university in the Irish capital Dublin fading, and PJ negotiates the cusp of his teen years. 

Murray’s prose is effective and versatile, and his storytelling absorbing. The plot pulls, dangling each successive revelation about the family’s past to the reader through well-constructed scenes. 

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But The Bee Sting’s strength is more than its plot. Murray is a master of perspective; each tract of narrative is bound to one character, the prose changing in form and style to match and express the persona.

For example, Imelda – uneducated and anxious – has her point of view told through endless run-on sentences with little punctuation, creating an image of a fearful, racing mind.

This is enjoyable to read in its own right, as Murray switches with great realism through voices and modes, effortlessly negotiating the tragic, the comic and everything in between. This binding of perspective is used to great effect when the characters are seen from the point of view of others as well as their own. Locked out of any form of objectivity, the reader is presented with different versions of each character, and differing versions of a given event, each as justified as the next.

This effect carries through the sprawling 656 pages, leaving the reader with no simple account of events, only a mish-mash of different truths to sort and feel through, elevating what could be a simple, sordid plot to the literary. 

The nuance in the construction of the main cast does not, however, always extend into Murray’s treatment of themes or side characters. Minor characters are sometimes reduced into caricatures or tropes – the beautiful and seductive housekeeper, the wily businessman, the shady foreigner. 

Themes also suffer from oversimplification – the novel does not say much more about climate change other than it is bad and threatens us, and we should band together to stop it.

However, taken as a whole, these too are consequences of the solipsism and self-centred perspectives of the Barnes family as they struggle to look outside their own lives and love those around them.