Presentation for the Women’s University Club Feb 12, 2025

The Bee Sting is contemporary Irish literature a popular genre. Our club’s Morning Book Discussion on Fridays, a 75 year institution, is currently featuring contemporary Irish Literature. Is anyone here today participating in that? I have read a few books in this genre and plan to read more. The Bee Sting is a big book, a whopping 650 pages. The size may deter some readers–but if I like it–the size is a promise to me of hours of entertainment. And as I’m sure I have told you before, I give a book 30 pages, sometimes 50 before I give it up. I loved the characters. They are full-fledged human beings I will remember. They are funny, flawed and love each other very much. They care about the world, global warming and the frightening aspects of the financial crisis that began in 2008. They have morals and are all struggling to try to do right in a world that seems to be collapsing around them. I loved reading the words. The language is melodic. One of the author’s particular accomplishments is writing teenage thought and speak. He has demonstrated this talent in several of his books.

What the book is about

Family. Love. Love of children. Moral dilemmas. Teenagers. Romantic love. Marriage. The repercussions of the crash of 2008 throughout the family, the town, the country and the world. When you’ve become used to prosperity how do you cope when you’re poor? It’s about life.

The Characters

The story is told by the four voices of the family. You get to know each character intimately from the sections they narrate. The characters who tell the story are the parents, Dickie Barnes and Imelda Barnes and their two children Cass, 16 and PJ who is 12. The kids begin the story so you learn about them first and about the parents and the situation from their point of view. You will learn the back story from the parents about the previous generations and what their childhoods were like. One thing I didn’t like is the lack of punctuation whenever Imelda is narrating the point of view. You’ve nothing but capital letters to go by to mark the sentences which makes you re-read many sentences to try to follow her narrative. The author considered the lack of punctuation an insight into how her mind worked. Research yielded a reader saying he had returned the book to the bookstore he was so frustrated with the lack of punctuation and to his surprise they refunded his money. That surprised me too as an extremely service oriented bookstore. Imelda’s daughter Cass describes her style of speaking early in the story which helped me be patient with her sections.

“To spend time with her mother was to get a running

commentary on the contents of her mind – an incessant barrage of

thoughts and sub-thoughts and random observations, each in itself

insignificant but cumulatively overwhelming. I must book you in for

electrolysis for that little moustache you’re getting, she’d say; and then

while you were still reeling, Are those tulips or begonias? There’s Marie

Devlin, you know she has no sense of style, none whatsoever. Is that

man an Arab? Who invented chutney, was it Gorbachev? And on, and

on – listening to her was like walking through a blizzard, a storm of

frenzied white nothings that left you snow-blind.”

Cass is a high school senior when the story begins, # 1 in her class and completely involved with her girlfriend Elaine in the way only teenagers can be. They spend every hour then can together, at school, afterwards at one of their houses and then text message, sometimes one word at a time, laughing hilariously until 2 in themorning. They plan to be poets and move to Dublin to go to Trinity college as soon as possible and never return to this small town. They idolize their new teacher who is a poet and create a big problem for her. Cass also contributes to the plot with her collaboration with her father on a Geography project where they calculate how his work, selling cars, contributed to global warming. He was so disturbed he did the math twice and began bicycling to work which Imelda never stops castigating him about. It doesn’t look good for the car dealer to bicycle instead of drive! Everyone in the family but Imelda is concerned about the effects of global warming and the inability to do anything about it on a small or large scale.

Both Cass and PJ are tormented by the kids at school for theloss of jobs and money as the car dealership suffers in the recession. Cass gets in over her head with bad behavior with drinking, Elaine, boys and a mysterious foreign mechanic who looks like trouble even to her inexperienced eyes. In the opening section Cass and Elaine are driving around one town over with said mechanic looking for the house of a man who killed his family and the three of them end up drunk in the bunker that will become a big project of Dickie’s. It may be because of Elaine’s suggestion that he gets a job at her father’s garage. This is an ominous first domino in a chain with the mechanic. Cass suffers horrendously when from time to time Elaine drops her for another friend or talks of having another roommate at college. Everyone in her family suffers when she suffers. PJ keeps a running list of her faults #1 SARCASTIC, #2 DISRESSPECTIFUL TO OTHER FAMILY MEMBERS, #3 NEGATIVE ATTITUDE, # 4 DOESN’T CARE ABOUT ANYONE ELSE’S PROBLEMS.

Another subplot involves Elaine’s father, Big Mike, who continues to buy expensive vacations and clothes for Elaine that Cass isn’t getting anymore. Dickie was once an equally hot shot businessman around town as Mike and then is usurped by him. Dickie’s kids have only photos of ski trips and island vacations instead of actual suntans. Mike becomes a manager at the car dealership as Dickie is demoted by his dad, Maurice. Big Mike is also attracted to Imelda. As you see, it goes on and on and gets worse and worse. P.J. is in the 8th grade and experiencing all the horrors of adolescence and bullies at school. The author shows such skill in developing all the characters but his portrayal of the kids breaks your heart and makes you laugh. Porn on the cell phone costs money so they try to look in a window of a house in a failed subdivision where Big Mike installed his Brazilian housekeeper when his wife became aware he was having an affair with her. PJ and his buddy are trying to film through a window a man they don’t know having sex which makes PJ feel very guilty and he wants to go home. The noise his buddy makes arguing against this alerts the man and they flee in the dark to safety. That was PJ’s first encounter with the foreign mechanic, recognizable because of his black hair and tattoos, possibly Nazi tattoos. That episode was lighthearted compared to PJ being so upset about his parents not getting along and how he’s going to come up with $163 E he needs to pay off his torturers at school. PJ tries to escape troubles at school and his parents bickering playing video games. He’s also making a new friend on online, Ethan, who lives in Dublin and has the newest version of the best video game. PJ is pretty sure running away to Dublin is the only solution to his troubles. Ethan is encouraging him on this plan.

When Dickie was in university he had a life planned that had nothing to do with the town, his family, his father’s car dealership and garage. He was surrounded by intelligent men who loved books and learning. In his third year, he was in love with Willie and enjoying every aspect of the relationship. The dramatic circumstance of his younger brother Frank, the football hero that everyone loved, dying in a car accident, led him in a roundabout way to marry the pregnant, once-fiancé of his brother. His father just can’t cope with Frank’s death and moves to Portugal leaving Dickie with his house and everything else. Although he has no business sense at all, Dickie takes over the dealership. When times were good and people were buying cars, that didn’t matter too much.

Fatherhood, another thing he hadn’t planned on is soon his job. Before he became a father, he imagined the relationship as being like an intensive version of owning a pet. The child, he thought, was essentially passive, a vessel into which you poured your love. On TV hat’s how it looked. Children were silent, dormant; you went into their bedrooms, gazed down at them fondly, drew the blankets over them as they slept. But in life, he discovered, parenthood was like … living with a person. A new person, with strong opinions, strong tastes, arbitrary swings of emotion, all of them addressed at you. You were the passive one: the work of care was primarily to endure, to weather the endless, buffeting storms of unmediated will. I looked up “unmediated.” Technically it means: no intervening persons, agents, conditions. To help us all recognize what I believe is the common complaint of every parent, I’d recast the sentence to say: the work of parenting was primarily to endure the endless storms of irrational emotions from the child with no help from anyone–or the universe. Feel free to try to recast it to suit your experience.

As things deteriorate Dickie devotes himself to working on his bunker in the woods where the family could survive Armageddon. Assisted by Victor, a survivalist, who Imelda hates the sight of, not because he’s freakish looking but because he did such horrible renovation work on their house, there’s an element Don Quixote to this project and the passion in it. PJ also is a participant in the bunker project during the summer months. As PJ tells a friend, Victor is not a dwarf, he has poor posture.

Imelda was the most beautiful girl in four counties as a teenager and 20 years later still turns heads on the street. She was engaged to a football star, from a rich family, dreaming of her escape from a poor and violent household where everyone was brutalized but herself. Her father didn’t want to damage her beauty and the good fortune her marriage would bring him. When her fiancé, Frank is killed in a car accident, she stays grief stricken in Franks bedroom in the dress she wore to the funeral for weeks. She does not want to go back to her father’s house. Dickie consoles her in the middle of the night when she screams and soon they become lovers and pregnant. He asks her to marry him, not knowing what else to do. No one in either family is happy about Imelda marrying Dickie, but the horror of moving back home inspires her to go forward. She has no hint of his sexual preference and has some hope for their future together.

Fast forward 16 years later, the marriage has its frustrations but the 2008 crisis forces her to sell jewelry and clothes on eBay, which is humiliating. This is the beginning of endless arguments with Dickie. Dickie’s father Maurice has arrived and Imelda hopes he’s going to save her, save them all.

What Happens

The action of the story goes back and forth in time sometimes in the same sentence. The plot, takes on cataclysmic forms of nature as in avalanche, landslides, cyclones, earthquakes, that are all disastrous, devastating, shattering to each family member individually. They suffer in ways they can’t believe anyone else is impacted or could appreciate. They all have secrets. For example, Dickie’s father, Maurice, thought by all to be rich, living in Portugal, is coming to town briefly to be honored at a local event and some family members, Imelda and PJ, see him as their salvation. Dickie and Cass do not. Imelda kills herself cleaning the house and getting the kids in new clothes for the event so she can ask Maurice for the money to bail them out. She knows you must look the part to make the sale.

PJ plans to ask him for the money he needs to save himself from being beaten to death by Ears for not paying up the money he thinks he owes him. Cass wants to go to Dublin to look at an apartment with Elaine and is devastated she is not allowed to go. PJ in his new clothes, awaiting Maurice’s arrival, is sent at the last minute to the store to buy a cake. On the way home he is assaulted by the beast Ears who is blackmailing him, dragged down an alley and threatened with a steel bar. PJ arrives home muddy, bruised, new trousers ruined and no cake. Imelda is furious. This is typical.

Cass, so sad about not seeing the apartment in Dublin, drinks about six free martinis at the event honoring Maurice, passes out at the dinner table and is taken by ambulance to the hospital to have her stomach pumped ruining the event. Dickie stays in the hospital with Cass so Imelda can handle Maurice. He knows his father thinks he’s useless.

Within a few days Maurice tells Imelda he’s staying in town for a while as an audit has revealed there is missing money and many customer complaints about missing catalytic converters. This is Imelda’s first glimpse that things are much worse than she thought at the car dealership. She cannot believe anyone would think Dickie is dishonest.

The Obstacles–the Villains

The kids both have challenges that seem overwhelming to them at times and insurmountable to this reader too. The mechanic is a Machiavellian nightmare wherever he goes and whoever he deals with. The reader learns in bits and pieces from his conversation and his tattoos that he is from Poland near a Nazi women’s camp from WWII. He is damaged in ways we don’t learn which doesn’t excuse his lack of morals but gives insight into how he feels free to take or steal anything he can. He is a sexual predator. It turns out the missing money in the dealership bank account was to get the mechanic to leave town. It can always get worse and it does. The mechanic comes back while Maurice is in town after being away for months to extort a second time as his girlfriend is pregnant. You may recall his girlfriend is the Brazilian housekeeper that was originally Big Mike’s employee and girlfriend who was kept in the house in the failed subdivision that PJ and his buddy liked peeping through the window. This mechanic is now a much more serious moral dilemma for Dickie and Big Mike as the story comes to a climax. Big Mike has also become a dilemma for Imelda. His long time desire for her has finally yielded an emotional return from her but adultery is a mortal sin! She must talk about with Dickie about this.

PJ’s runaway to Dublin hits a hard stop at Cass’s apartment where she and Elaine are hosting a disastrous party and she refuses to let him stay. Then his friend Ethan is revealed to be a senior citizen pedophile who has tricked him into putting a tracking device onto his phone. Given her poor situation, Cass reconsiders, leaves her party and races around Dublin in the rain looking for PJ and barely rescues him. On this dark and stormy night, they catch an irregular bus from Dublin that will drop them off near the woods by their house, not the town, to try to find Dickie at the Bunker to help them. Imelda also races to find Dickie at the Bunker to explain to him how complicated it is that she wants big Mike. Victor and Dickie are in the Bunker waiting for the mechanic to come for his money which they don’t have and plan to shoot him. Big Mike is also waiting for the mechanic at the house at the subdivision with money and the pregnant girlfriend. It’s a wild night.

What the Critics Say

The book was recognized by Irish, UK and American organizations winning several prizes for fiction and was named to many best of the year type reading lists. The New York Times Top 10 Books of the Year,
Winner of the Post Irish Book of the Year, the Nero Gold Prize, and the Nero Book Award for Fiction, Finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction,
One of The New Yorker's Essential Reads of 2023, One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2023, One of TIME's 10 Best Fiction Books of the Year. Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Guardian, The Economist, New York Public Library, BBC, and more.


There’s an impressive amount of smart people who like this book. Here are three brief excerpts from the smart folks.

 
—Jen Doll, The New York Times Book Review “Murray’s writing is pure joy — propulsive, insightful and seeded with hilarious observations . . . Through the Barneses’ countless personal dramas, Murray explores humanity’s endless contradictions: How brutal and beautiful life is. How broken and also full of potential. How endlessly fraught and persistently promising. Whether or not we can ever truly change our course, the hapless Barneses will keep you hoping, even after you turn the novel’s last page.” 



—The Washington Post (Ten Best Books of 2023) “Murray is a fantastically witty and empathetic writer, and he dazzles by somehow bringing the great sprawling randomness of life to glamorously choreographed climaxes. He is essentially interested in the moral conflicts of our lives, and he handles his characters and their failings with heartbreaking tenderness.”

—Justine Jordan, The Guardian “Murray is exploring the way families can always sense the emotional temperature, even if they don’t know where the fire is coming from. He is brilliant on fathers and sons, sibling rivalry, grief, self-sabotage and self-denial, as well as the terrible weakness humans have for magical thinking, not least in regard to the climate crisis. He can also create a laugh-out-loud moment . . . You won’t read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year.” 


The Author, Paul Murphy

He began his publishing career with ‘An Evening of Long Goodbyes,’ while studying for a MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and nominated for Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. This is a story of a teenager and all that implies. His second book, ‘Skippy Dies’ about teenagers and college boys was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His third book, ‘The Mark and the Void’ was the joint winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and was named one of Time’s Top 10 Fiction Books of the Year. This book concerns the financial markets and a swindler with no morals whatsoever. Paul Murphy has received a great deal of attention from the beginning of his career. I think it’s well deserved.

The Rewards of Reading this Book

The great recession of 2008 isn’t that long ago. If the world should have the misfortune to experience another, we’ll all have better coping skills, right? If The Bee Sting is your cup of tea you’ll have days of unique entertainment ahead of you. Listeners will receive an estimated 26 hours. You will add some new characters to your list of those you won’t ever forget.

It has been a pleasure talking to you about all these things I care about. The books, the reading experience, the characters and the authors who bring us such pain and pleasure. Thanks for coming today.