The Bee Sting - Paul Murray

 

Paul Murray's The Bee Sting is a novel about the lies, deceit, cover-ups, and soul destroying self-guilt endured by the Dickie Barnes family. 

Dickie and Imelda Barnes live in rural Ireland with their teenaged daughter Cass and adolescent son PJ where Dickie runs the car dealership started by his father when Dickie was just a boy. Everyone in town envies the family and their prosperous lifestyle. But that is only because no outsider can possibly know that this is a family right on the verge of fragmenting into nonexistence. Dickie, instead of going to the dealership every day where he belongs, spends his time building an end-of-the-world bunker in the woods for his family; Imelda is tired of pretending that she and Dickie still care about each other and is considering an affair with a man she can barely tolerate; Cass has gone from top student to one just counting the days until she can begin a new life for herself in Dublin; and PJ is trying to figure out the best way to run away from home without being caught even before he gets out the door.

The tricky thing is that Dickie, Imelda, Cass, and PJ are not the people they are pretending to be, even to themselves, much less to each other. Each is hiding a secret that eats away at them, but none dares discuss their secret either inside or outside the family.

The Bee Sting is long (643 pages), but it is so well constructed that it reads much shorter than it is. The novel opens with four long sections, each written from the point of view of a different Barnes family member. The section titled "Sylvias" features Cass, a bright teen who senses that things are not right at home or in the family business but, like most teens would, worries more about how it all affects her than about what it means in the long run for her family. Next in "Wolf's Lair" is a look at the family through the eyes of twelve-year-old PJ, a boy who is more sensitive than his older sister as to how bad things really are in the family. PJ is busy making plans and saving coins to get out before it is too late. It is in the section titled "The Widow Bride" that readers learn Imelda's backstory and begin to understand just how fragile the Barnes family has been right from the beginning. And finally, in "The Clearing" readers get a look at Imelda and Dickie's backstory from Dickie's point of view. 

But as well as readers may think they know the main characters at this point in the book, there is still so much more to come.

Murray picks up the pace in a section titled "Age of Loneliness" in which he use shorter, alternating points-of-view segments from the same characters to build a sense of unavoidable, impending doom. As the Barneses continue to try to make sense of what is happening to them, their individual segments begin to end on little cliffhangers and hints of major trouble just ahead that keep the reader turning pages. 

Next comes the book's final 25 pages in which the points-of-view switches come at such a breakneck pace that The Bee Sting begins to feel more like a ride on a runaway train than the brilliant novel it is. And then there's that ending...which some will love, and just as many will hate, especially after such a long ride with the Barnes family. Murray chose an ambiguous ending for The Bee Sting, one that the reader is going to have to interpret for himself. It's an ending I've thought about all afternoon and into the late evening before finally reaching what I believe to be a logical conclusion as to how it all ended for the Barnes family on that dark, rainy night in the forest outside their home. I just wish I could tell you about it...

Paul Murray jacket photo