‘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

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

In 2010, Paul Murray published the novel ‘Skippy Dies’. All of the reviews that I read at that time were very positive, and it went on to win numerous awards. The novel was said to be both comic and tragic at the same time, in other words right up my alley.

Ordinarily I would have been quick to get a copy of ‘Skippy Dies’ and read it. However there was one problem. ‘Skippy Dies’ was 672 pages long. How in the world was I going to read a 672-page novel and keep my book blog site active at the same time?

I kept postponing and postponing reading ‘Skippy Dies’. And at the same time, the reputation of ‘Skippy Dies’ seemed to grow as the years went by.

I kept kicking myself for not having read ‘Skippy Dies’.

In the meantime Paul Murray published another novel, ‘The Mark and the Void’, which did not create quite as much of a stir as ‘Skippy Dies’.

Now in 2023 Paul Murray has published another novel, ‘The Bee Sting’, and again this time the reviews are uniformly superlative. It’s been longlisted for the Booker Prize and so on.

But ‘The Bee Sting’ is again over 600 pages. However this time I’m not going to make the same mistake as I did with ‘Skippy Dies’. I began reading ‘The Bee Sting’ four days ago, and I am already to page 260 which means I’m already over 40% done with the novel.

This time Paul Murray has written an Irish family drama and not in a humorous vein. There are scenes of terrible menace in this novel. The opening quote is quite acute in capturing the mood of ‘The Bee Sting’:

“Those are my best days, when I shake with fear.” – John Donne

‘The Bee Sting’ is working out to be a quite immersive read for this reader who is fully engaged in the lives of these four family members.

Stay tuned for Part II of ‘The Bee Sting’, my final review of the novel, which will appear after I complete the novel. In the meantime I will be publishing a couple of reviews of other novels I’ve recently read.

‘The Mark and the Void’ by Paul Murray   (2015) – 459 pages

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‘The Mark and the Void’ is a brilliant preposterous ragtag jumble of a comic novel.  It is about the banking industry.

“The story of the twenty-first century is the banks.  Look at the mess this country’s in because of them.”

It takes place when the Celtic Tiger, the years of phenomenal Irish prosperity, collapsed and died.  Some banks had made large outrageous investments which proved to be worthless, and they needed the Irish government to bail them out. Huge amounts of government money which were meant for the handicapped, the disabled, and the destitute instead went to failed executives at corrupt ‘too big to fail’ financial companies as multi-million dollar severance packages.  The United States had this same problem as Ireland when the investment firms Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns went bankrupt in 2007, and the entire financial industry was shaky.  It was the onset of a severe global recession.

“The radio waves are clogged with hard-luck stories derived from the last wave of cuts: grandmothers and children and chronically ill whose pensions were cut or whose special-needs assistants were withdrawn or whose care was cancelled overnight by governmental austerity, even as yet more billions flow in decidedly unaustere fashion to the notoriously corrupt bank.” 

Despite this sorry backdrop, ‘The Mark and the Void’ is a comic novel told from the viewpoint of a banker named Claude.  After the first hundred pages, I thought this novel was the most insightful sharpest dissection of the banking industry I had ever come across.  However after I completed the novel, it seemed to me more like a hodge-podge, somewhat of a mess. ‘The Mark and the Void’ is a shaggy dog tale that keeps getting shaggier and shaggier as it progresses, but I forgive Murray because of the long stretches of humorous brilliance.

Somehow Claude’s bank, due to a policy of moderation, had avoided the collapse but now they bring in an executive from one of these failed banks.  He has the banking crew make ‘counterintuitive’ investments.

One of the most absurd characters here is a novelist named Paul. Paul approaches Claude to ostensibly write a novel about a banker as Everyman. Claude agrees, and Paul follows him around at the bank for several days and then brings in his Russian friend Igor.  Paul and Igor are casing the bank for a burglary, not realizing that this bank is an investment bank and has no vaults.

Since Paul is a novelist, we do get into a literary subplot which is so ridiculous it somewhat undermines any serious points to be made about banking.  The novel really does not contain any original or shattering insights into banking, nothing that hasn’t shown up already in the newspapers.  It is strictly for laughs.

There is a nice little subplot about Claude obsessing over a waitress in the nearby café while he is oblivious to the woman working right near him at the bank who really cares for him.

There are too few novels about the modern-day business world, so ‘The Mark and the Void’ is a welcome, if shaggy, addition.

Grade: B+