Booker season continues with Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting Western Lane (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2023 – thanks for the advanced copy!) – a chunky tragicomic family saga set in post-crash Ireland that boosts a unique approach to storytelling. The first section of the novel is divided into four parts – one for each family member – and told in third person. The second section of the novel, still from the POV of the family members, shifts to second person. The third and final section is brief and jumps from multiple POVs, including those outside of the family. These are quick, jolting flashes of moments, like footsteps in the woods, the beat of a heart, or the pull of trigger. (I’ve thought for years that the book selections echo books from the prior year’s list – this makes me think of Trust.)
The Barnes family used to be filthy rich. Dickie took over the lucrative car business, married the beautiful Imelda, and fathered two children – Cass and PJ. Their lives were seemingly perfect. Then the crash happened, and the family-owned business is going under. Cass, in her final year of school before University, is being swallowed by her own teenage woes. PJ, 12, spends his days playing in the woods and helping his father build the Bunker. When his dad’s problems at work spill over to bruise PJ, he decides to run away to stay with an online friend – a dangerous relationship that the reader recognizes long before PJ. Breathless and beautiful Imelda takes the reader on an unpunctuated journey into the past, to a poor childhood in a violent home where her mother dies of cancer, to when she first meets the Barnes family and how she ends up with Dickie. And Dickie, the man who never wanted to take over the family business. When tragedy struck, he became riddled with guilt and left not only his greatest love behind, but his truth. He married Imelda, took over the business, and became a father. But the crash is killing the business and he’s being extorted by a beautiful stranger whose claws have touched the entire family. He spends his days building a bomb shelter to protect his family in the event it all goes to shit.
Dickie walks in a fog of guilt, madness, fear, desire and shame. Imelda walks in a fog of grit, guilt, loss, desire and shame. Cass walks in a fog of confusion, anger, desire and shame. PJ walks in a fog of loneliness, confusion, fear, and shame. And when the ghosts and the fog bring them all together in the woods that have marked them all, their lives will forever change.
While I found it a bit long-winded, and I don’t think the objective with the lack of punctuation in Imelda’s section was successful, this is a solid read from a list that has been rather lackluster.
Read this book.
Booker count: 6 of 13
**One of the 2023 judges is a Shakespeare scholar. I’ve decided to keep track of the novels that name drop Shakespeare or his works. Cass is studying Macbeth making this 4 of 6.
A Girl Named Tommi 