Suitable for Children: Yes, but only for older teens. May inspire climate anxiety.
Suitable for Adults: Yes
Like many great writers, Paul Murray’s Ireland-set novel is effortlessly, universally applicable to anyone.
The Bee Sting is set in the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, about a family whose fortunes are going from riches-to-rags, while at the same time, climate change is causing serious floods in their small town.
A family novel, the story is told from four perspectives: Dad Dickie, Mom Imelda, Teenage Daughter Cass, and 12-year-old Son PJ.
Capturing the Children’s Perspectives
Mr Murray is very witty and hilarious, convincingly in the worlds of Cass and PJ.
The Cass perspective is my favourite part, because of how relatable it is.
He captures Cass’s aggravating case of teenhood — her obsession with her rich, social media-obsessed best friend, Elaine, her insecurity about her own riches-to-rags family and her ill-timed discovery of boys and alcohol just before her GCE ‘O’ levels. But rather than just laughing at her, he honours her fledgling intelligence and her struggle to find her identity as a good person buried under all the adolescent madness and insecurity.
PJ’s perspective is funny and endearing. A tender-hearted 12-year-old boy, PJ is smitten with video games and science facts. His biggest problem? He needs to raise money to pay a bully, who accuses PJ’s family of stealing from his mother. PJ is aware that his family is slowly falling apart, causing him to come up with dumb but well-meaning schemes to raise money and to bring his family back together.
A Darker Turn into the Adult Perspectives
Mr Murray takes a darker turn delving into the adult perspectives.
Mum Imelda’s story is elemental and full of violence — she grew up poor in the hood, with a drunk father and a clairvoyant Aunt Rose. Her beauty helps her escape into the middle class, by marriage to Dickie. Alluding to her lack of education, Mr Murray uses stream-of-consciousness for her perspective. The lack of punctuation in Imelda's part may prove challenging for the reader. If it is a dire case, skipping Imelda's part does not detract too heavily from the plot.
Dad Dickie's part is central to the forward charging plot. His regrets and thwarted ambitions are re-directed into a very funny attempt to catfish an ex-lover, then a doomed affair, and finally, a doomsday bunker building project that ultimately ends in unspeakable tragedy.
A Novel That Engages on Climate Change
The floods, storms and searing heat that plague the Irish countryside reflect the devastation of the family's fortunes.
However, they are more than just an allegory.
With Ireland a small country that still imports most of its food, as one character says, a famine in Europe could bring starvation to the Irish again.
And yet we continue not to do anything to stop it, because the things that are causing it, the things we’re doing that are making it worse – building buildings, taking planes, driving cars, eating meat, buying stuff, having children! – these are the very things that make us us. So we seem to be faced with an impossible dilemma: if we don’t want to be killed by climate change, we have to stop being ourselves. You can see why people aren’t exactly rushing to man the barricades. The thought of addressing it actually seems in some ways worse to us than being killed by it. Or put it another way, the thought of no longer being ourselves is harder for us to get our head around than the thought of being dead.
- From “The Bee Sting”
Unlike many big contemporary novels that don't mention climate change or capitalism at all, The Bee Sting is a brilliant classic that fully engages the world we live in.
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