This book was nothing like Infinite Jest, but I’ve shelved them together, because I similarly can’t work out whether I really liked this, or really didn’t. So, strap in, as I overthink it.
It’s going to be a spoiler-filled review – last chance to get off this train if you haven’t read The Bee Sting as yet. I’m not going to lay out the basics of the plot and characters – the assumption is that you’re already across the who, what, where and when.
I would usually avoid this type of family drama, where I can reasonably expect some gritty realism and to feel weighed down by how fucking difficult it can be just to get from one end of the day to the other. However, my boss is on Mat Leave, and recommended it, and I like my boss, so here we are. Overall: I devoured this in two days, and once I’d finished, I kept expecting to slip back into it, having forgotten that the characters had finished their cameo in my own day to day.
There have been some reviews/complaints about the ending being ambiguous. I’m a hard disagree on that. I think everything about the way the book was structured makes the ending pretty unequivocal, even if we cut to black, Sopranos-style, before anything was actually spelled out. The first lines of the book are about a man who killed his entire family, one town over from our protagonist family. “How does that happen?” ask the characters; “Hold my beer,” says Paul Murray, and the novel proceeds to show us how a family can descend from triumph into tragedy.
One thing I really enjoyed was the way the structure of the book enforced the themes. Each character’s perspective showed different, unlikeable facets of the other family members; put another way, we spend the novel walking a mile in everyone’s shoes, with understanding eluding us until we do so. Each character’s perspective shortened, too, as the novel progressed. By the time we hit the chaotic final pages, each perspective shift is happening so quickly, the names are closer to what you’d see in a play than a chapter heading. It had the effect of making the whole book feel almost like I was watching water drain from a bathtub. An inevitable, narrowing downward spiral.
This is reinforced by the content, where not only does the past come back to haunt the characters, we also see it being repeated by the next generation. I loved so much about this book! The characters and story were compelling, and the whole thing felt really lived-in. My concern was that it would descend into trauma porn territory, and I never felt that, despite what are clearly traumatic times for the characters.
However. The things I didn’t like also felt… massive. Like the lack of punctuation! The Imelda chapters were not just missing quotation marks, but almost all forms of punctuation, including commas and full stops. Sentences were delineated by capital letters only, for the most part. Whist I understand this as a character beat for Imelda – lack of education plus stream of consciousness reactivity makes sense for her – it was an absolute beast to get through, and the only time I found myself flicking ahead to work out how much longer I had to put up with her.
And while this might seem like a very weird thing to say about a novel where (I maintain) the bulk of the family is killed in the end, I didn’t feel like there were any legitimate stakes for the characters. I always use early seasons Entourage as the shining example of this: no matter what threatens to bring him down, Vincent Chase never faces any real consequences – everything always comes up trumps (I stopped watching early for exactly this reason; no idea if his chickens ever came home to roost). The first time the novel pulled back on what I considered to be a realistic consequence was with Cass and her exams. I honestly believed that she’d faked her good marks for her parents, and would end up in Dublin pretending to go to Uni (and I waited a long time for a reveal that never came on that). I am calling bullshit on her binge drinking her way through swotvac and still acing all her tests!
It felt like all the characters were pushed right up to the edge of calamity, but pulled back so that they were saved for the final pages. Whether this deliberate so the ending landed with added shock value/impact is debatable; I could see an argument that it was a choice to avoid the characters slumping into the sort of trauma porn I’m always keen to avoid. It actually lessened the impact, for me, since it took me so far out of the reality of the story I couldn’t emotionally re-engage with the actual stakes in time. PJ’s last-second rescue, the hints that Dickie’s boyfriend Willie may have contracted AIDs that came to nothing, even Cass & Elaine’s aborted-without-consequence episode with Ryzsard in the bunker, all add up to a feeling that the characters are living in an alternate universe. I don’t wish trauma upon these kids, but maybe there’s no need to dip them into peril if you plan to leave them untouched by it.
Ugh, I’m talking myself into and out of this by turns this morning! Regardless, as with Infinite Jest, I’m not sorry to have read it, and it’s stuck with me.