Summary:
The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under—but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter, Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches on his grand plan to run away from home.
Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil—can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written—is there still time to find a happy ending?
Review:
This is one of the rare cases where the book’s teaser tripped up my expectations of what the book would be like, and it affected how I read it. From the synopsis above, I got the impression that the book was going to focus more on how small actions can have big consequences, and that perhaps it would be structured in a non-linear way. I thought it might tell the story in reverse, starting at the ending point and proceeding in chunks back to a pivotal event. Or, I thought it could tell the same story several times from various small events and play out how things would–or wouldn’t–have changed.
But none of that happened. Instead, The Bee Sting is structured in a traditional manner, with the action moving forward in time, interspersed with some flashbacks. The only mention of the idea in the synopsis is a quote on page 601: “How did it come to this? You look back at the past and you can’t tell where exactly you went wrong. Was it a single misstep?… Or is it everything? Your years raising a family, running a business, your little loves, your thwarted desires, your whole innocuous life, has it all been leading up to this moment?” (I cut out a few sentences so as not to spoil things.) I feel like there was a real missed opportunity for the author to try something unique, to play with the story format in a way that could have been mind-blowing.
That’s not to say that Murray doesn’t have some tricks up his sleeve. He does something expected with the narrative voice. The book has four long sections that follow each of the four family members: Dickie and Imelda, the parents; and Cass and PJ, their children. These sections are in third person, much as you’d see in other novels. Imelda’s section differs from the others in that her chapters use almost no punctuation, giving her thoughts a headlong, runaway feeling that mirrors her personality. But then, after each person has had their own chunk of the text, they start again, but this time the narrative voice is in second person. The change pulls you more deeply into the action, because now it reads as if you yourself are part of the thoughts of each of the characters. The chapters are shorter, and no one character has an entire section to themselves–chapters seem to bounce around among the characters. And the final piece of the story is a single chapter with all of the characters, short sections of each of them, alternating among them and getting shorter and shorter as the novel moves to its climax.
I also enjoyed the metaphors sprinkled throughout the text. The theme of the past rising up, ready to strike at you, weaves through the story. This is especially present in the use of water, with flooding, rainstorms, and wells standing in for the hidden passions and secrets that come out when we least expect it.
My only complaint about the book is that I think it could have been edited down so that it doesn’t sprawl on quite as much. While readers will definitely get a good feel for all of the characters and their motivations, there were some parts that were a slog to get through and had me thinking “Okay, we can get on with it anytime now.” For the most part, though, I was engaged with the action and eager to see what would happen next.
This isn’t a perfect book by any means, but there is much about it that is well done and thought provoking. Its nomination for the Booker Prize was well deserved. The Bee Sting is a challenging book but worthy of attention.
