Murray, Paul. The Bee Sting. Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 2023. F;9/23.

This long generally quite wonderfully-written book surprised me. It was one of six on the 2023 Booker Prize shortlist, and the last but one I’ve read. I’m not sure why I decided to read them at all except just curiosity to see if I could predict the winner. Up to about 80% of the way through this one I thought it had the prize sown up. But then as the complex ending developed I didn’t think it was fully satisfying at all. It seemed a bit strange that a writer this good couldn’t conclude things gracefully and with impact. Great characters, wonderful dramatic scenes, humour, touching insights and depth of human sentiment, but then an ending that seemed to deflate everything and everybody, flat.

(I’m not going to bother with plot alerts in the next three paragraphs but if for some reason you are keen on reading this novel I suggest resuming reading four paragraphs down)

Gorgeous Imelda, the darling daughter of her coarse lowlife dad, meets and falls in love with perfect macho athletic Frank who is the hero son of wealthy car dealer Maurice Barnes. Their romance is thrilling and perfect until Frank is killed in a car accident after becoming a drunk and losing his edge. In the present, Imelda is married to Frank’s brother Dickie and they have two children, 12-year-old PJ and 16-year-old Cass, both troubled by personal and interpersonal problems, worsened by the financial collapse of the car dealership under Dickie’s direction.

Sections of the story focus on characters sequentially, first Cass and PJ, and then the adults. Darker events and personal crises erupt for the adults, especially Dickie whose successful academic career at Trinity College veers into homosexuality which he subsequently tries to abandon but which leads him into a spiral of disaster. There is a side plot that pushes its way into the dramatic centre as Dickie attempts to avoid catastrophe by building a sort of bomb shelter behind their home.

Meanwhile Imelda meets with her middle-aged girlfriends who function as a sort of Greek chorus and whose insights are spot on and at times hilarious, Cass fights her way at Trinity through an adolescent crush on her friend Elaine, Elaine’s dad “Big Mike” hooks up with Imelda after an affair with their housekeeper, a dark handsome Polish criminal mechanic contributes to the collapse of the car dealership and Dickie’s desperation, and aunt Rose who is a kind of clairvoyant surprises Imelda by failing to recognize her in a visit to her in a dementia nursing home. And the Bee Sting which was supposed to have messed up Imelda’s face on her wedding day turned out to be just a swat from disappointed daddy’s big hand.

Momentum and reading fun is sustained by wildly contrasting social classes, and trenchant insight in the writing and manipulation of the several plot lines. A few samples (author quit using punctuation about 1/3 of the way through the book):

Frank used to call (Imelda’s) homeplace the Badlands His name for Daddy was Garbage McCrowbar She imagined … what kind of a nursery Daddy would build Made out of car tyres … Or one of his old mattresses from the back yard.

Married with children – the ultimate unphrodisiac Geraldine says I wish someone had told me that when I was forking out two grand for a wedding dress…

I suppose that’s what everybody wants, isn’t it. To be like everybody else. But nobody is like everybody else. That’s the one thing we have in common. We’re all different, but we all think everyone else is the same, he said. If they taught us that in school, I feel like the world would be a much happier place.

Dickie the main protagonist carries the theme and metaphor of the story which progressively looks and feels like inevitable transformation into chaotic misunderstanding and a kind of social and personal unraveling. As that ending I mentioned was building to its climax I kept hoping, and trying to imagine and predict how, author Murray was going to get us all out of its whirling gathering absurdity.

And then finally when all the plot lines and characters’ lives failed to conclude I’m looking at the last page of the book. All the interest, excitement, character development, fascinating events and everything they stood for like the characters in The Tempest just dissolved without leaving much behind. But unlike in The Tempest speech there was no concluding sweetly metaphoric truth. I had to accept that nobody involved here carried enough stature for the mess they all ended up in to feel worth the trouble. Just six hundred pages of wonderful fiction that slowly self-destructed into a vacuum.

One more Booker candidate to go. This one was the longest and I guess for all its vacant conclusion in some ways was one of the best. At the moment it looks like a race to the bottom.

8.1/9.2