As Paul Murray writes in The Bee Sting, twelve-year-old PJ Barnes realizes that the last few years have been a slow, methodical undoing of everything he ever thought was true. PJ is aware that his family is falling apart. Cass, his older sister is preparing to go away to college in Dublin. She has shut herself away from the family and won't talk to PJ anymore. Their parents, Dickie and Imelda, are fighting over dwindling finances: their car dealership in their small Irish town is going under.
Pj escapes by memorizing scientific facts and playing video games. He comes in contact online with someone who calls himself Ethan. "Ethan" is based in Dublin and chillingly tries to coerce PJ to run away from home and come to him. PJ is considering it in the hope that it will shake his family out of its self-involved affliction. In an effort to save his mom stress, PJ hides the fact that his shoes have gotten too small for him and endures constant pain because he knows they can't afford new ones.
Cass is navigating her way through her last year of high school and trying to figure out who she is. She has complicated feelings toward her best friend and deals with it (and her fraught home life) through excessive use of alcohol. When Cass learns a dark secret about her family, she becomes more closed off and caught up in the small Irish town's party scene.
Intelligent, gentle Dickie is showing signs of unravelling. Dickie's father, Maurice, who originally started the car dealership, comes back to town when summoned by Imelda. Stressed-out Imelda wants her father-in-law to bail them out with cash, but Maurice learns there is a huge chunk of money missing from the Dealership's accounts. In addition, someone has been stealing carburetors out of the cars that come into the garage for repairs. Maurice fires Dickie who then retreats to the woods to build a survivalist-style bunker with an odd duck local named Victor.
The family's origins come to light through flashbacks. While Dickie is in college his younger brother Frank, Imelda's then fiance, dies in a car crash. Dickie is just discovering important truths about himself, but he pushes his desires down and comes home. He shoves aside his true love and ambitions and changes the course of his life in a self-delusional act of righteousness.
Imelda's traumatic youth of abuse and extreme poverty do not overshadow her beauty; as a teen this leads her to popular, star-football-player Frank. Her loss and heartbreak over Frank's death ultimately define her life. The grief and resulting magical thinking bring her to Dickie and their marriage. Decades after Frank's loss, her anger masquerades the pain she still holds in her heart.
Paul Murray's writing is powerful. When Dickie is considering Imelda's beauty (still his brother's girlfriend at this point), he thinks that it's "like an expensive piece of jewelry that has only been rented for the evening: she wears it anxiously". In addition, when Murray writes in Imelda's point of view there is no punctuation. Therefore, the chapters take on a stream of consciousness style that reflects Imelda's state of mind: chaotic and frenetic. These chapters are at once taxing and mesmerizing to read.
Murray also utilizes characteristically wry Irish humor: Imelda considers that the net unusual-looking Victor wears over his head is "a mercy to everyone" and Cass ponders that a Trinity College classmate has "no appreciable character traits". Also, Dickie as a child imagines God's voice to be "a sonorous basso, like a benign Darth Vader".
Mostly, The Bee Sting is devastatingly fraught with beauty and truths. When Dickie becomes a parent, he comes to the realization that "to love someone is to open yourself up to a radically heightened level of suffering". Maybe that's what his friend in college meant when he said, "we are all different expressions of the same vulnerability and need." The anguished human condition is on full display in Paul Murray's 642-page novel. This book is nothing short of astounding, up to and including the ambiguous, heart-pounding ending. I give it five out of five stars.
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