Mind Picker: The Bee Sting

Good man, Dickie, they said. Maith an fear Good man. The only dampener was the bee sting; she was still wearing the veil. At the same time, was it the worst thing? It suggested a hint of sorrow remaining beneath the surface; it silenced any voices that might otherwise have found the celebrations unseemly, too joyous. In Imelda’s veiled face, anyone who wanted to could divine the pain you had suffered, what it had taken you to get here.

At first, The Bee Sting reads like an ordinary contemporary family drama — beginning from the POV of a teenage girl in her last year of high school, acting out as the aftermath of the Irish recession puts immense financial and social pressure on her bickering parents — but this is a long book (656 pages) and author Paul Murray has plenty of time and space to make this something other than ordinary. After giving each member of the Barnes family a section in which to introduce themselves, Murray rewinds to the childhoods of the parents, narrating the remarkable story of how this unsuitable couple got together, and as the timeline pitches forwards and backwards, we learn the secrets hidden in the heart of each character and grow to understand that no one can ever really know anyone else at all; we can barely know ourselves. The character growth was remarkable, and the plot was compelling, but this is, at its heart, a social issues novel with some trickiness to its construction that will either annoy or impress the reader. I loved many bits of this — I wouldn’t say I loved it overall (even if I could totally see it winning the Booker this year) — but I was definitely impressed. I’ll try to avoid spoilers.

Many of them felt that Imelda was to blame. Dickie made a fortune and Imelda spent two — that was what people said. Imelda, with her cheekbones and her Italian leather boots, got up like the Queen of Sheba just to drive to the supermarket! Giving the poor manager an earful because they didn’t have star anise or tamarind or whatever was supposedly all the rage in New York! It’s a long way from tamarind she was reared, they told each other darkly. It’s a long way from underfloor heating and orthodontists or any of that palaver. Well, look at her now.

Despite Ireland easing itself out of The Crisis (Dickie’s father insists that the recession is over and there’s no reason for the car dealership he founded and left in his son’s hands to manage should still be losing money), Barnes Motors is under threat of closing and Dickie’s family is feeling the pinch: wife Imelda is forced to sell off her designer clothes and furnishings on ebay; daughter Cass doesn’t see the point of studying for her Leaving Exams if there’s no money to send her to Trinity College in Dublin in the fall; and twelve-year-old son PJ is unaccountably worried that he’ll be sent to boarding school if things don’t turn around. In reaction, Dickie spends more and more time in the woods, working on a bunker for his family’s future security. In the beginning, watching this plotline unspool seems to be the point — and as everyone seems privileged and self-centred (except for PJ), I wasn’t sure that I even wanted to commit to this brick of a novel. But things aren’t really what they seem: everyone has pain and repressed desires; people misrepresent themselves (especially on social media); hammers are swinging every which way; black dogs forewarn danger; even a bee sting isn’t what it seems. This really isn’t about the Barnes family at all.

Several times throughout this novel, Murray references an Irish fairytale about a man who joins a fairy feast inside a hillside and discovers the next morning that he’s been missing for a hundred years. Time slippages — as well as fate and fortune telling and repressed memories — feature throughout, as when Dickie takes Cass on a tour of Trinity College and remembers his own days studying there:

Even on a normal day, he remembers, passing beneath that arch had always felt like going through a portal — like you were leaving one city and entering another that lay in its midst, a place of pure past. Yet looking at it now he feels as if no time has elapsed at all — as if his own life were still there, continuing somehow untouched by the years, in some eternally resonating present.

This is Imelda considering the vagaries of time (and I see reviewers calling this a Molly Bloom-like stream-of-consciousness, but sections from her POV are really just missing the end-stop periods; her sections do have question marks and exclamation points where appropriate, so I thought of this as something else; a mind basic and untrained?):

Time doesn’t do what you think it will does it You get your turn But they don’t tell you that’s all it is a turn a moment Everything explodes you’re nothing but feelings Your life begins at last You think it will all be like that Then the moment passes The moment passes but you stay in the shape you were then In the life that’s come out of the things that you did The remainder of that girl you used to be is gone They don’t tell you How could they How could anyone make sense of that

And the following is from a guest speaker at Trinity, and in my opinion, is the heart of the whole thing:

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.

It seemed to me that Murray introduced us to the Barneses, and made us understand and care about these people, just to stress that their lives don’t matter in the depths of time; that they are just more human parasites on the planet Earth’s resources. And then, seemingly out of nowhere — just as the climactic scenes are being set up in the final one hundred pages — a paragraph that sounds like it’s a message directly from the author himself appears:

Today, in the developed world, the great threat to political order is that people will pay attention to their surroundings. Thus, even slaves have access to entertainment. You could even say we are paid in entertainment. The novel was the first instance of what in the twenty-first century has become a vast and proliferating entertainment industry, an almost infinite machine designed to distract us and disempower us. We are presented with a virtual world powered, literally, by the incineration of the real.

From this point on, there is much dramatic irony as each character marches inexorably toward danger of their own making — each of them running in a dark wood towards a squirrel trap — and the plot becomes a little breathless and over-the-top, and I started turning the pages faster, wondering if Murray had set up humane traps or if he would swing the hammer down. And I see that some readers think he nailed the ending, and others think he flubbed the ending, but I think he constructed everything very purposefully towards that ending. If a novel is nothing but an example of “an almost infinite machine designed to distract us and disempower us”, what does that say about the kind of reader who has the leisure time to read a brick of a novel for ten or twelve hours? As we march inexorably towards the consequences of our Earth-imperilling lifestyles, couldn’t we be marching in rallies — marching for change — instead? I got the sense in the end that this book is so long — and culminates in scenes that are breathtakingly engaging — to leave me with the feeling that I had been fiddling while Rome burned around me. And I appreciated the trick that Murray pulled off to make me feel that; I’m left impressed.