THE BEE STING

An Irish family’s decline is rendered in painful, affecting detail.

The opening line says “a man had killed his family” in another town, and “rumours swirled about affairs, addiction, hidden files on his computer.” Are these portents of what awaits the Barnes family, who will inhabit the next 650 pages? Certainly they are struggling with an array of problems. In the wake of a recession, the Volkswagen dealership run by Dickie Barnes has seen sales plummet amid a surge in complaints about repair work. A disgruntled client’s son threatens to beat Dickie’s boy, PJ, with a hammer. PJ's sister, Cass, is struggling with a fickle bestie and booze. Their mother, Imelda, facing her neighbors’ schadenfreude, has stopped shopping and dreams that a flood is taking everything away from her. Flashbacks reveal the poverty and old passions that color Dickie and Imelda’s marriage. She’s still mourning her late fiance, Frank, a handsome star athlete, when she weds his unexceptional brother, Dickie, whose sexual adventures at Trinity College loom over his business worries 20 years later. In his three previous novels, including Skippy Dies (2010), Murray showed a talent for blending humor and pathos. His fans may be dismayed to find almost no humor here. Mainly there is an inexorable trudging from bad to worse, with Murray tirelessly inventing fresh woes for the Barneses. And while financial pressure is a propulsive force—as it is to varying degrees in all his novels—other pressures come into play: sexual, religious, educational, community, parental, peer. It’s hard not to feel the author is piling on, not to wonder how the novel might have gained from some comic relief. At the same time, no moment or episode is implausible, and carried by Murray’s fine, measured prose and uncanny plotting, the book presents a striking abundance of what for too many may be normal life.

A grim and demanding and irresistible anatomy of misfortune.