Actually Pretty Good: The Bee Sting
On Paul Murray's melodrama in the age of the anthropocene
While the literary canon elicits visions of dusty, dry tomes, of serious literature, where not much happens in impenetrable paragraphs, the classics are often more soapy than they’re given credit for. They’re all venerated as literary classics for reasons beyond plot, but it’s hard to ignore just how much Days of Our Lives-style pure incident takes up the capital C-Canon. Dostoevsky’s Idiot and Brothers Karamazov both feature wild love triangles, and, in between bouts of philosophic disputes, someone might get riotously drunk, fall ill with brain fever, or get into fight that ends with someone being whipped in the face. Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge begins with a man selling his wife and child for more booze money, and even that can seem tame against some of the more lurid happenings of Return of the Native or Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Middlemarch, everyone’s idea of a staid British novel, relies heavily, plot-wise, on a mysterious stranger coming in from out of town with a dark secret, as well as an Uncut Gems like gambling plot, and, reader, there’s a madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre.
Realism and modernism curtailed a lot of those big plots in literature, and pawned them off to the middlebrow: romance books, thrillers, whatever you can pick up at the airport. And sure, those realistic novels were able to depict life in a less frenzied and more real way, bringing a dignity to life as it’s actually lived, and I happen to like a lot of recent books where not a ton happens, per se,1 but at the same time: sometimes you want a big story just a bit larger than life! You know, a story! And not something corny either! There are the rare times that an artist boldly decides that in the schism between plot and style, they’ll choose both. Por que no los dos? I’ve already written about how much I love Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus, which might be the 20th century’s best collision between high writing style and near-manic and absolutely sadistic plotting, but one can also look to the 21st century’s best TV show, Mad Men, which used the hook of juicy plotting – Don Draper has a secret identity! everyone’s cheating on their wife! Sal is in the closet! Peggy’s pregnant?! – to deliver cable’s most slow-developing, formally ambitious, and oddly existential program. Paul Murray’s 2023 novel The Bee Sting is the latest entrant into the field, skillfully blending high style and formal experimentation with a swirling and ever deepening plot. With the constant looming specter of future climate hell looming over The Bee Sting, the various twists and turns of the book have a melodramatic flair, all actions seemingly performed against the backdrop of the end of the world. If Murray didn’t have his talent, or his sense of humor, it’d be ridiculous; fortunately, he does, and so the result is astounding.
The novel follows the Barnes family right around the 2008 financial crisis; Dickie, the putative patriarch of the family, runs a struggling Volkswagen dealership (started by his father) in a small town an hour’s drive from Dublin. His wife, Imelda, is tightening the belt to make ends meet month to month; his daughter, Cassie, is in her final year of high school and trying to balance her social life and her school life, with the final goal of getting out of dodge and into university in Dublin; and his son, PJ, is in the strange transitional period between childhood and adolescence where you simultaneously know a little too much and too little about the world. Each of the characters is given a part of the book in their voice, starting with Cass, moving on to PJ, and then into the world of adulthood with Imelda and Dickie. Murray begins on a note of dread – “In the next town over, a man had killed his family” is quite the first sentence – and then quickly moves from familial, small scale terror to something more global:
Last year Cass had done a project for Geography class about climate change. With your parents’ help you had to calculate how their work contributed to global warming. Dickie had thrown himself into this; he loved homework. They sat in the kitchen and made lists of all the cars the garage sold, estimated how much CO2 it had taken to make them and ship here, worked out on average roughly how much greenhouse gas they would released over their lifetime. At the end they added the numbers up.
Cass could remember that moment very clearly. It had all been fun until then. Flippin’ hell, Dad said. He looked from the picture Cass had taken of Maurice Barnes Motors to the images of sodden Bangladeshi refugees after their village went underwater. That can’t be right, he said, checking the final total again.
According to Imelda, he was never the same after that. He’d started making vegetarian meals and cycling to work. Lunacy! Imelda said. What does it look like, a car dealer riding a bike to work?
Murray peppers references like this throughout The Bee Sting, the pervasiveness of these references mirroring the perpetual crisis of climate change: there is always an image in the news of some disaster happening somewhere in the world (here it’s “sodden Bangladeshi refugees”), till it eventually comes for you, in ways big or small. The Barneses suffer through an intolerably hot summer and an historic rain storm that floods the area, which, the characters reflect, is just the first historic storm to come. Cass and PJ are more effected by the gloom – it’s their future getting ruined, after all – while Dickie struggles with the world he’s leaving his children. (Imelda is more focused on surviving the day-to-day to dwell on larger forces). Impending crisis simmers under the surface, as if the characters are frogs in a very slowly warming pot, and this lends an almost eschatological feeling to the interpersonal dramas that develop throughout the book.
And God, do those dramas ever develop! If you’re squicky about spoilers I guess let your eyes glaze over for this paragraph, but The Bee Sting is built around the revelation of secrets, dark and seemingly supernatural omens, reckless decisions, and a gallery of Chekov’s guns and Damoclean swords set up early in the novel that are then precisely deployed throughout.2 Cassie’s friend Elaine notices that there are no pictures from Dickie and Imelda’s wedding day in the house, an odd omission for a beauty like Imelda; Cass then discovers that Imelda was originally engaged to Dickie’s much more popular brother Frank, who died in a car accident years ago, and that Imelda was stung by a bee on the way to her wedding with Dickie and thus wouldn’t lift her veil during the ceremony; Elaine’s dad “Big Mike” cheats on her mom with the housemaid, and then has his eyes set on Imelda; Dickie’s father has to come back to help with the dealership, and gives Big Mike a part of the business, edging Dickie out, and now Dickie’s building some kind of apocalypse bunker on his property?; Cass and Elaine have their own intensely teenage female friendship issues, swinging wildly between close friendship and iciness; PJ is about to get his ass kicked by a bully (and have said ass-kicking livestreamed) because of something that happened at Dickie’s dealership, and might run away from home (and said ass-kicking) to stay with an overly-eager internet friend in Dublin; and a mysterious and distractingly handsome Polish mechanic has rolled into town, and might be stealing people’s catalytic converters? Or seducing them? That précis mostly just covers the first half or so of the book, and only really scratches the surface; by shifting characters and employing flashbacks, Murray is able to constantly change what the reader thinks they know, and then reveal something else that changes that knowledge. These are the old storytelling tricks of serialized novels and melodramas, which rely on withholding information to create narrative shock; instead of feeling like a cheap trick, however, these reveals come to seem to be a natural part of each character’s well developed voice.
The differences between Cass, PJ, and Dickie’s narration are subtle; some trace of Murray remains in all their voices, but each has their own register. Cass is prematurely world-weary, disappointed by the world of her parents and the world that she has to soon enter, but also trying to enjoy her youth, “simultaneously terrified and free.” PJ is younger and more childishly naive, imagining that all of life’s problems can be solved by simple cause and effect:
Granddad is coming! The day after tomorrow! In his imagination he’s at the door right now, arms loaded with presents! He will give Dad money – money will fix whatever is wrong with the garage – Mam will get her proper moisturizer and stop being angry about her complexion – Cass will go to college – PJ will pay off Ears and not get his bones broken – everyone will be happy and there will be no more talk of divorce or boarding school and everything will be all right again from now on for ever! Hurrah hurrah!
Dickie’s voice is that of a beaten down man, the constantly besieged saint (at least to himself). “Being good, he discovered, was no good. No one loved you for being good, except God, presumably, and even there he was beginning to have his doubts.” He is torn between his self-interest and the lives of others, and chooses to martyr himself for those others, and he can never quite reveal to them the depth of his sacrifices, the pain of the“blank unfillable life he found himself burdened with.” “At the same time, you see how often he justifies his own mistakes, how rashly he chooses to reward himself for wearing the hairshirt.
It’s Imelda’s sections, though, that elevate the book from a decently entertaining family story into the transcendent. Even now weeks after finishing the book the name I M E L D A feels imprinted across my brain in big flaming letters. It’s not quite the explosion of language that is Molly’s soliloquy in Ulysses but it’s probably the closest thing to it since then.3 The whole section is written in syncopated fragments, a stream of consciousness from someone who never really got a proper education, thought crashing into thought, no periods, a rolling flood of pure language. Imelda grows up destitute, the daughter of a low-level gangster, and lives with her somewhat mystic Aunt Rose for most of her childhood after her home is harrowingly invaded by local toughs while her father is away; it’s this destabilized upbringing that creates the chaos that seems to be ringing through her head at all times. There’s no way to relate the accumulative effect of her section, but one can get a taste, at least. Here’s the ending of Imelda and Frank’s first meeting at a dumpy small-town club:
She pulled away from the boy Wait he said Give me your number but there wasn’t time Two big lads in Puffas were wading through the crowd towards them Please he said sounding desperate It was very romantic Lar tugged at her Come to the match! the boy called after I’ve a match next week in town Will you come Okay okay she said over her shoulder Promise? he cried but they were running already weaving through the tunnels of sweating bodies like rats till they escaped into the night
On and on it goes, torrentially, extensively laying out the details of her and Frank’s relationship, her grief after his death, what led her to Dickie, and her fear of falling back into poverty in the present. With so much plot in the book, the section can’t help but move the plot along, but more than anything the section is just a bravura performance of voice, a bone-deep bit of characterization on the base level of language and thought.
It’s on this high writerly level that Murray brings his book above cheap heartstring-pull trickery; on the lower level, he’s just an alarmingly funny writer, particularly attuned to the attendant strangeness of contemporary life, as well as the particular texture of interfamilial dynamics. Few writers can convey as well as Murray the flatness of the internet, the ways in which it quickly juxtaposes triviality with the disturbing. PJ, being the youngest, is the most native to this casually dark world; when he’s not playing a Call of Duty-like video game about Nazi zombies that requires one to know what a kapo is, he’s being shown porn by a not-quite-friend with the title “Teachers punish naughty twink and fuck his brains out” with the further recommendations
Dwarf gets busy with teen cutie
tied up twink begs for mercy from hung dwarf
real incest dwarves certified realCan’t help noticing your algorithm’s generating a lot of dwarf porn here, PJ says.
On the other hand, PJ can Google, in the time of need,
‘sacred flower prayer.’ There are 12,000 results. The top one looks pretty authentic to him, though he can’t tell if it’s the same as the prayer she gave him.
Putting the medal on over his head, he begins to read: O Most Beautiful Flower of Mount Carmel, Fruitful Vine…
It feels weird reading a prayer off his phone, where he has looked at so many unreligious things. He hopes the Virgin Mary knows it’s meant for her, that he’s not praying to e.g. Candy Crush or Pornhub.
It’s these frequent funny turns of phrase and jokes that prick the surface of the novel, deflating it whenever it threatens to become too self-serious. Melodrama can’t survive pitched to such a high degree; the levity counterbalances the darkness, bringing things back down to somewhere closer to the world as we know it, and helping maintain the pathos of the unfolding family tragedy.
The formal conceit of the back third of the book, titled “The Age of Loneliness,” is shorter chapters about each character but now narrated in the second person, and it’s not quite as successful a formal experiment as Imelda’s chapter. It seems to me a sort of universalizing gesture, meant to bring the reader into these characters and implicate everyone, as a species, in the question of what exactly the future will hold, whether we are inextricably locked into the path set forth in the past or whether a new future can be created with enough change. “You wonder if you did turn around would you even be able to find your way back to the road, is there even a road left to find.” With climate change threatening the collective future, the accidental arrival of the present moment – how it crashes out of the events of the past, and how that past can never really be escaped – is the thing that constantly bewilders the various characters, as if life were a constant succession of Well, How Did I Get Heres? that have the sickening answer of a destiny seemingly ever beyond our control. “You couldn’t protect the people you loved – that was the lesson of history,” Dickie reflects at one point, “and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering. He said I love you to his wife and it felt like a curse, an invitation to Fate to swerve a fuel truck head-on into her, to send a stray spark shooting from the fireplace to her dressing gown.” Is that it, then? Fate as a truck bearing down on you, with no escape?
For a novel that is so meticulously constructed through the first three quarters or so, the ending that we’re brought to is daringly ambiguous, supporting both extremely dark and more hopeful resadings. It’s a gambit that could read as a writer not wanting to definitively torture his beloved creations – not everyone can be as cold-blooded as a Shirley Hazzard or a Magda Szabo – and leaving open the small possibility of hope that all is not lost. The contrary evidence that things are bad and only getting worse is much stronger, but the fat lady hasn’t sung just quite yet on human possibility. As one character puts it quite directly late in the novel, “we’re at a moment where either we make a serious change to the way we live, or we destroy ourselves […] 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. As the poet says, We must love one another, or die.” We likely won’t…. but maybe? Perhaps? In spite of everything? For a writer who dares to have it both ways – plot and style, expertly executed – I suppose we can allow Murray both hope and despair, no matter how faint that light may be.
Thanks to paid subscribers Julie L., Henry K, and Joe D. for putting me onto this book. (I trust them more than the New York Times.) Paid subscribers get to request pieces and reviews and also get personalized recommendations!
You can get The Bee Sting (now with a New York Times top ten sticker on it) at your local independent bookstore, local library, or online at Bookshop.org, where all sales support independent bookstores across the country.
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Cough cough, Rachel Cusk.
Foreshadowing is back, baby!
An Irish writer invites this comparison, sorry.
Finished last evening. Suffering serious “book grief”