The Bee Sting

A Novel

De: Paul Murray

Narrado por: Heather O’Sullivan, Barry Fitzgerald, Beau Holland, Ciaran O'Brien, Lisa Caruccio Came

Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize

From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under—but Dickie is 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 and half-heartedly dodging the attention of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter, Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge drink her way through her final exams. As for twelve-year-old PJ, he’s on the brink of running away.

If you wanted to change this story, how far back would you have to go? To the infamous bee sting that ruined Imelda’s wedding day? To the car crash one year before Cass was born? All the way back to Dickie at ten years old, standing in the summer garden with his father, learning how to be a real man?

The Bee Sting, Paul Murray’s exuberantly entertaining new novel, is a tour de force: a portrait of postcrash Ireland, a tragicomic family saga, and a dazzling story about the struggle to be good at the end of the world.

©2023 Paul Murray (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Decent story, unsatisfying finish

The narration was superb. The story was good until the end. Intersting but ultimately unsatisfying.

Intensely beautiful, heart-wrenching tale of a family trying to find themselves and each other

I didn't read most of the reviews prior and I am so glad that I didn't. The audio version gives the reader a perspective I imagine you wouldn't find in the paper version; this ability to easily slip into the mind of every member and feel their love, their pain, their heartache. Each of them is voiced by their own distinct actor, so that there is never a question as to whose head you are in at any moment. And each voice has their own unique struggle and while, yes, those struggles can be difficult/painful to read or reconcile, they are real. Their feelings, their actions, the consequences, they are all so real, so possible, that you as the reader will feel all of it so intensely that perhaps it hurts.
This is what makes a great novel. A story that grips you, pulls you in with a blazing fire so intense you may wish you could let go, let it drop to the floor so it can't burn you. But it is in your ears, with a back and forth that swings you from one story to the next, intertwined so seamlessly that you become a character yourself. A ghost, a silent family member looking on.
I saw reviews saying they didn't like the characters but I feel as those people are missing the point, or maybe reading the wrong kind of novel. Characters, like normal people, are not perfect. They have flaws, they make bad choices, have thoughts that they would never want spoken aloud. There is a reason people go to marriage counselors, why teenagers have a bad reputation. It would be easy to find terrible qualities if you had access to anyone's deepest, most personal thoughts. Having fatal flaws only made their stories more realistic, more relatable and all the more compelling
As for the ending, I couldn't imagine a better one. I understand that some readers found it frustrating to not know exactly what happens in those last, frenetic, terrifying moments, but no matter what the true ending was, it would have been devestating. Whichever path the author could have chosen the outcome would have been the same. In fact, I may have loved this last chapter best. The buildup of these different voices, previously split into their own chapters, are given lengthy stretches to tell their part. Then as the story builds, the intervals between each perspective shortens, until this last chapter: a back and forth between all of the characters. (Again, having a different narrator for each voice makes these switches, typically a daunting task in audio format, simple to follow and all the more intense). I found myself holding my breath, standing still in the middle of midtown Manhhattan, unable to move in case I might miss something. Yes, the ending is not typical, everything isn't tied up neatly with a little red bow. But I wouldn't want that ending. I didn't need to know exactly what happened in order to feel the raw emotions, desperation, love, hope and fear, coursing through these characters in these final moment. I felt those emotions right along side of them (and couldn't stop bawling, again, in the middle of 34th street). To say more would give too much away, but whatever path was chosen, they all would have lead to the same, inevitable and awful conclusion.

Well, so . . . . and other Irish tales

26 hours is a long listen. It is performed beautifully and Paul Murray is a great writer. You are inside the head of the teenaged daughter, pre-pubescent son, mother and father - in that order at least till near the end. Mr Murray does a better job with the male characters than the female characters, IMHO, but all the characters have stellar sections. It takes awhile to get into this book. The character development and stories come to together in the middle. The last sections are almost impossible to stop listening to. The action, the plot, builds and builds and builds till . . . splat. I did not like the ending. Book club members may discuss the ending endlessly, but I felt my 26 hour investment just did not pay off.

5-star prose, story and narration, w/a terrible end!

One of the best books I’ve read and listened to in a long time, mostly coming of age for each character in the family. The end, grrr

Literary but depressing and a lot of work

I almost quit listening in the first section — one more coming of age saga with stupid choices. Then the narrator changed and the story got more interesting. But, in the end it was still a deeply sensitive telling of a complex plot where all the characters make interlocking, depressing, stupid choices. It is clearly a great piece of writing, which is why I finished it. But, like novels by Jonathan Franzen, the pain of appreciation may outweigh weight the pleasure of the read.

Not my cup of tea

Performance was excellent, but book is very long and the story and most of the characters were disappointing.

The Inner Lives of a Modern Irish Family

One of the best fictional stories I’ve listened to all year….until the last two sentences. Dickie, Imelda, Cass and PJ were all very real in their heads and doings. I felt deeply for all of them, their choices and travails. Sometimes I wanted to reach through the story and shout “Wake the F*** up!” But we can’t do that, can we? In real life or in stories.

The ending

Best book I’ve ever listened to/read w the possible exception of east of Eden

Narration was incredible.

Fantastic epic tale of a family, and all the things you think you know about people closest to you, but you have no idea

If Murphy wrote a dishwasher manual, I would read it

This book is so full of feelings, the huge, illogical, irresistible feelings that build over lifetimes and flash out when their owners are exhausted from holding them in check, that I found myself wondering how the things we feel don’t kill us outright. Everyone, Murphy knows, has made at least one terrible decision in his or her past, But he also recognizes that the decisions that doom us may arise perfectly justified from many smaller, innocent actions taken before. We may drop our banana in a sudden, ill-fated dash after a bus with no destination sign, and we have no hope of knowing how our discarded peel has devastated the person behind, sprinting with a fifferer