The Book Club and Paul Murray’s Bee Sting

Paul Murray, The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton 2023)

Before the meeting: Grandparenting during school holidays has left me with very little time to write about The Bee Sting before the Book Club meets, so this may be sketchy.

I loved it. It’s a beautifully written Irish novel, a family saga in which each chapter focuses on a family member in rotation, with a couple of other characters taking a chapter each. A teenage girl, Cass, can’t wait to leave her tiny village behind and go to University in Dublin with her unreliable best friend. Her younger brother, PJ, is in a world of trouble at school. Their father, Dickie, is in much worse trouble as his Volkwagen dealership, inherited from his tough-man father, is falling on hard times, and – as we discover – that’s the least of his worries. Their mother, Imelda, formerly a stunning beauty, is bitterly discontented. There’s adultery, blackmail, teenage alcoholism, survivalist adventures in the woods, small-town scandal-mongering, a malign version of the Terence Stamp character in Pasolini’s Teorema, and a final chapter that feels like a version of the opening of Act Two of Sondheim’s Into the Woods …

A friend of mine who worked as an assistant director on TV says he usually has to read a novel twice: the first time he is in professional mode, taking note of the locations; only on the second reading can he attend to characters and plot. I’m pretty sure he would love his first read of The Bee Sting. The locations are brilliantly realised: a shed in the woods that is in turn a place for young people to hang out, a site of sexual danger, a survivalist project, a place for a secret stash, and the focus of the book’s final movement; the prestigious but grungy ‘Rooms’ at Trinity College; the elegant, dilapidated family home; the contrasting house where Imelda grew up; some new project homes that have been left unfinished when the Celtic Tiger failed.

What kept me in thrall, though, was the way characters’ back stories unfold like petals on a surprising flower, involving among other things the tragic death of Dickie’s elder brother (a local sports hero who had been engaged to Imelda and who was, we believe, the apple of his father’s eye), a car accident that injured Dickie in his days at Trinity College, and the titular bee sting that meant Imelda’s face remained hidden under her veil at her wedding.

The story of the bee sting turns out to be just that: a story. And the same goes for almost every story from the family’s past.

Rather than saying any more about the book in general, I want to focus on one moment. It involves a minor character named Willie. As a young man at Trinity he embodies the brilliantly witty, ironic, flamboyant element of university life that intimidates and entrances young Dickie fresh from small-town life. When Dickie leaves university after his brother’s death, Willie disappears from the book, only to turn up much later to give a talk that Cass attends almost by accident. The talk goes for roughly five pages, and is a brilliant example of a scene that does many things at once: it brings us up to date with WIllie’s life, showing him to us in a new light; it gives his perspective on a key incident that until now we have only seen from Dickie’s point of view; it moves Cass along decisively on her trajectory; it brings to the fore the book’s preoccupation with climate change and – possibly – allows the author to put an argument that’s dear to his heart. At least, it spoke to me as if from his heart:

Here’s a little from toward the end the speech:

Togetherness is crucial, if we’re to tackle something as total as climate change. Banging your own little drum, demanding everyone look at your mask, be it a consumer status symbol or one of sexuality or race or religious belief or whatever else, that will do no good. Division will do no good. You may gain some attention for your particular subgroup, there may even be minor accommodations made. But you are moving the deckchairs on a sinking ship, diversity deckchairs. Global apocalypse is not interested in your identity politics or who you pray to or what side of the border you live on. Cis, trans, black, white, scientist, artist, basketball player, priest – every stripe of person, every colour and creed, we are all going to be hit by this hammer. And that is another fact that unites us. We are all alive together in this sliver of time in which the human race decides whether or not it will come to an end.

I just love that. The fact that a few pages later a young character characterises the speech as loathsome fascist rhetoric only deepens my awe for Paul Murray’s story-telling.

After the Meeting: The Bee Sting shared our agenda with Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos (link is to my blog post). We generally liked this book much more than the other, though more than one thought it was a good yarn but not much more than that. The Emerging Artist and I definitely liked the book more than everyone else.

One person singled out Willie’s speech, though for a very different reason from me. She saw it as symptomatic of the way the book is contrived, its world kept deliberately narrow. Why bring that character back in? she asked. I don’t see that as a problem – it’s not even up there with Dickensian coincidences – Ireland has a small population, and the same people will keep on turning up.

We tended to agree that there were longueurs and improbabilities when Dickie, PJ and another man go on their survivalist project.

Spoilerphobia stops me from airing one genuinely puzzling thing that occurred to me during the discussion. But two, and only two, of the characters have names that seem to mock aspects of their story – not so much them, as perhaps one of the Club members thought, as the act of creating their story.

When someone said that the book would make an interesting TV series, there was general assent.