The Bee Sting

What a remarkable novel. I heard it recommended all last year and finally managed to borrow it from my local library, though I must confess I gulped when I saw the size of it -- 650 pages! These days a novel has to be pretty gripping to hold me for that long, and The Bee Sting was.

The novel centres on four members of an Irish family: mother, father, teenage son and daughter, and the story is told from the point of view of each in turn. The backdrop is horrible family dysfunction, the threat of violence, and climate change -- the summer is too hot and dry, the winter brings floods (this is the second Irish novel in a row I've read with an unnaturally hot summer). There is a mounting sense of impending dread, from which Murray pulls back each time, but the structure is very clever in that each section becomes shorter and shorter until it feels as if we are hurtling toward certain doom. Someone smarter than me pointed out that this is how the catastrophe of climate change also functions -- we experience a threat, we feel panic, but we survive, and we kid ourselves that we're safe... but the next wave is coming, and it's bigger and deadlier than the last, and one day it will be too late to escape.

From what I've said so far, you will gather that The Bee Sting is a bleak novel, and in many ways it is. But it's also rich and funny and shocking and beautiful, and though I'm still reeling from the final scenes, I'm so glad I went along for the ride. This is a novel that will stay with me for a long time.