The Bee Sting by Paul Murray was shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year and is even more impressive than his second novel Skippy Dies which I read last year. It is a portrait of the Barnes family who live in a small Irish town and have fallen on hard times following the financial crash in 2008. Dickie Barnes runs a car dealership which he inherited from his father Maurice. His marriage to town beauty Imelda is also in trouble. Their teenage daughter Cass is aiming to go to Trinity College Dublin and their 12-year-old son PJ is obsessed with video games.
As demonstrated in ‘Skippy Dies’, Murray is excellent at writing accurate teenage dialogue, although I was a bit less convinced by the absence of punctuation in Imelda’s section, which supposedly reflects her desperation and how her mind works. ‘The Bee Sting’ is less comic than ‘Skippy Dies’ and much more about anxiety regarding both the past and the future. The lengthy flashbacks eventually reveal that it is the events, decisions and near misses in Dickie and Imelda’s past which have really shaped the family’s current circumstances, leading to an unsettling but fitting conclusion. ‘The Bee Sting’ is an ambitious novel with satisfying character development.
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