‘The Bee Sting’ by Paul Murray   (2023) – 643 pages

Have you ever wondered about what kind of lives your parents lived before you were born? In their younger days, did your parents have the same kind of problems you have had, or were their problems completely different? How did your parents meet and later decide to get married? It is easy to forget that your parents were young once too.

Dickie Barnes owns a prosperous car dealership he inherited from his father. Dickie and his wife Imelda have two children, Cassandra and PJ. They live in a nice house in small-town Ireland. Everything is seemingly fine until the post-2008 Irish economic downturn. During the recession, the Barnes car dealership faced severe problems like many other businesses.

“A fall as dizzying as the Barneses’ couldn’t come from simple economics. There had to be a moral element.”

‘The Bee Sting’ is the examination of a family tragedy from the long perspective of past family history going back thirty years. It is told from the viewpoints of each of these four family members. Daughter Cassandra is worried that she won’t be able to get into college with her best friend Elaine. Father Dickie is trying to keep the car business going. His wife Imelda doubts that Dickie has what it takes to run the business.

“she and he The rich boy and the girl from the back arse of nowhere It should have been impossible It was so easy.”

Son PJ sees his family disintegrating.

From the reviews I’ve read, I get the impression that Murray’s previous novel ‘Skippy Dies’ is quite humorous, However ‘The Bee Sting’ is a heart-stopping dramatic realistic portrayal of a family in crisis. There are scenes in ‘The Bee Sting’ of terrible menace that will leave you on edge.

Despite its length. ‘The Bee Sting’ is a relatively quick read. The reader gets so immersed in this family’s situation that the pages fly by. ‘The Bee Sting’ has the depth that you would expect from a long novel. By depth I mean that the characters are more complicated and ambiguous than usual. Each of the main characters has their strengths and weaknesses, their good and not-so-good points.

“We’re all different, but we all think everybody else is the same, he said. If they taught us that in school, I feel the world would be a much happier place.”

Author Paul Murray does take liberties with punctuation. When capturing a character’s thoughts or memories, he does not use commas or periods. I had no problems reading or comprehending this method. When our minds are in reverie mode, we do not have full stops or pauses, but keep rolling from subject to subject to subject.

“You’ve had enough past frankly to last you a lifetime.”

The scenes from the past of father Dickie and of mother Imelda determine to a large extent the present predicament of the family. In the suspenseful conclusion, all of the family members, some of them armed, converge in a dark woods at night in a heavy torrential rain.

Grade :    A