Pay attention to the first sentence of this epic novel. It is not Moby Dick’s “Call me Ishmael.” But it will linger in your memory long after you have read the last page. It is the story of the Barnes family – the father Dickie, the mother Imelda, and the two children, Cass and PJ — who live in a small unnamed town in the midlands of Ireland. Leo Tolstoy would have been all over the four Barneses because they are one very unhappy family, and each one is unhappy in their own unique, tragic way. Dickie’s once flourishing car sale business has tanked after the 2008 economic crash, and he has been forced to lean on his mercurial father-in-law and a dubious best friend and partner. Imelda, who has always been the most beautiful woman in any gathering during her entire life, sees herself caught in an unwanted marriage and living in a brutish backwater. Cass is a talented student but cannot find friends who share her ambition to go to university and achieve her dreams. And PJ is the innocent youngest child forced to navigate through the treacherous unhappy waters all around him. He worries his parents will get divorced, but in his efforts to save their marriage, he gets mixed up with a menacing neighborhood bully who threatens his very being.
That is just the start of it.
The plot has numerous twists and turns. The perspective and writing style shift from character to character with each passing chapter. There is movement backward and forward in time. The backdrop changes with the suddenness of the movement of scenery between acts in a play. The lives of the characters branch out in many directions, venturing into uncharted territory and intersecting unexpectedly at key moments. The prose and the imagery are textured to match each character. However, all the elements cohere, creating the experience of reading in a lived world.
The trajectory of each parent evolves darkly over time. Dickie is blackballed because of an identity he has kept secret all his life. Imelda becomes increasingly desperate, and her actions become more and more unhinged. The two children can only turn to one another to fill the gap left by their wayward parents. As disaster draws closer and closer to Dickie, he partners with a laconic neighbor to build an underground bunker in the woods to survive the coming Armageddon. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
This 643- page book is extraordinary. When I started it on the strong recommendation of my dependable oldest daughter, I was unsure if I would have the patience to persevere to the end. But this is an all-encompassing novel. Paul Murray has created a world, hauls you into it, and hurtles you forward into the turbulent stream of the characters’ lives. The artistry is astonishing. The setting, the interior monologues, the conversations, the actions are aptly described.
The story has an air of inevitability to it, which brings me to an aspect of this book that made it truly special: do things happen in the world at random or is everything linked in a deterministic web of causation? The classic expression of the determinist view is — if one single monarch butterfly flaps its black and orange wings in New York, then the subtle change in air flow in the Big Apple is passed along across the Atlantic, through Europe, across Asia in countless incremental steps and culminates in a monsoon in Bangladesh. The bee sting that furnishes the title for Murray’s novel is a seemingly innocuous event on the day of Imelda and Dickie’s wedding. But in the world of the book, it unleashes a sequence of events for each member of the Barnes family that defines their destiny. It seems as if they are trapped in a dense web and cannot escape the forces driving them forward to their ultimate doom. Yet, each character confronts moments of crisis, episodes of personal vulnerability and they make choices. They fail to answer the phone call, they opt to go to the party, they invite relatives to visit. Who or what is controlling their fate?
Philosophers have traditionally debated and continue to argue whether free will is a reflection of reality or whether it is a convenient delusion. We may never fully know or comprehend why things play out the way they do in each of our lives. It may always appear as if we are being moved around by relentless forces that are bigger than and invisible to each of us. At the same time, we feel that we have agency. That is the mystery of life. In a novel, there is an inscrutable controlling power, the author who is the puppeteer manipulating all the movements of his characters and the story. She can make events play out in whatever way she thinks best matches her vision of the paginated world. But good authors know that they must create human characters and not marionettes. They have to walk the philosophical tightrope between determinism and free will. Within a tightly constructed literary universe, authors must create a world in which the narrative captures the larger forces buffeting the characters drawn on the page, be it climate change, immigration to a new county, or the outbreak of war. But there must be space for the characters to behave as recognizable people subject to the consequences of their own choices or those of others. When authors succeed, the readers of their books realize that have been offered a precious insight about what it means to be fully human. No one has done this better than Paul Murray in this monumental book.
THE BEE STING
Paul Murray
Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux
New York, 2023 pp 643
Photo credit: Boris Smokrovic
