It’s Thirty Seconds to Midnight. Where is God?
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)
The shadow of doomsday hangs over Paul Murray’s new novel, The Bee Sting, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In the aftermath of a financial crash, Ireland is getting hotter and hotter; there are horrible floods, and no one seems to be doing anything about it. In response, Dickie Barnes, who manages the family’s once prosperous but now failing car dealership, joins his friend Victor out in the woods adjacent to his property, where they spend their days digging a well and fortifying an old shed into a bunker, hoping to fend off their ill-prepared neighbors when disaster inevitably comes.
The Bee Sting is told in a series of exquisite novellas, each from the point of view of a different member of the Barnes family. In the first, teenage Cass struggles with questions of friendship and being liked; in the second, her younger brother PJ must evade a bully who wants to extract an impossible sum in repayment for an alleged offense at the family’s car dealership. PJ texts back and forth with an online gaming friend who encourages him to run away, leaving us virtually certain that this “friend” is no child at all. Meanwhile, Cass and PJ’s parents are obsessed with their own problems: while Dickie works away at the bunker, his wife Imelda resentfully sells off her belongings on eBay to help pay the family’s expenses. In the children’s accounts, Imelda is little more than a thoughtless consumer; at best, you might say she is bored. And Cass has discovered that there are no photographs of her parents’ wedding, presumably because her mother was too vain to take off her wedding veil after she’d been sung on the eye by a bee on her way to the church.
But when Imelda takes over the narration in the third part, we learn that a bee sting on her wedding day is the least of her worries. As a young girl, Imelda is rescued from a very hard background by Rose, who has the gift of second sight. Imelda initially falls in love with Dickie’s brother Frank, a local football hero and the darling of his parents. She prevails upon Rose to tell her whether there will be sun on her wedding day–only to learn that there will be a ghost at her wedding, a ghost whose identity Imelda tragically mistakes.
When Frank is killed in a car accident, Dickie and Imelda eventually turn to each other in their grief–though nearly everyone tries to warn them off, including Dickie’s mother, who offers Imelda her insight on the relationship between the two brothers:
Though Frank was younger Dickie idolized him
No She caught herself He didn’t idolize him In fact I’m not sure he even liked him very much But everyone else liked Frank and that’s what Dickie wanted for himself He wanted to be the boy that everyone liked But he was very clever and very complicated and you can’t be clever and complicated and have everyone like you That is just not how it works And he ended up making himself very sad …
I just wonder what kind of a life you see the two of you having together
But Imelda is determined to go through with the wedding, and, having lost Dickie’s brother, she longs to see him appear in fulfillment of Rose’s prophesy. As she and Dickie take the floor for their first dance, Imelda sees her own hazy reflection in the mirror and realizes what she has done:
She was the one Rose had seen in her vision She was the ghost
A leftover from another life A remnant of something that was no more That was her Haunting the feast
Meanwhile, Dickie, who is filled with self-loathing after engaging in homosexual relationships in college, is desperately trying to settle the ghosts of his past. When he takes Frank’s place and marries Imelda, he tells himself that things are back in order: he will be the Frank that Frank was meant to be. But such thinking, of course, is inherently disordered, and instead of setting things to rights, Dickie is succumbing to darkness. He has begun spending his nights as well as his days out in the woods:
evening arrives, in the sudden, surprise-attack way it’s been doing all week as autumn takes hold, seeming to bloom from the air in dark-blue clouds that soak into it moment by moment until it is drenched, the air, the day, it is saturated in deep blue, like the blue clay dust that fills the well, immersing bodies, trees, the van, the tents, then slowly sealing them up within it.
Things begin to come to a head in Dublin, where Cass, like her father, attends Trinity College. Dickie makes his way there on the night of a terrible storm, having used an alias to try and reconnect with Willie, his former lover. Willie, meanwhile, is a candidate for office, and Cass and her friends hear him speak about climate change:
to face up to reality we first need to set aside all of these inventions and disguises we’ve been so busy accumulating. We need to take off our masks. … We are all alive together in this sliver of time in which the human race decides whether or not it will come to an end. … The sad truth is that right now, at the worst possible moment, we’re being deluged in new ways to hide.
But even as Willie proclaims our urgent need to drop our false selves and wake up to our danger, his suggestion that we alone can save humanity reveals the essential hubris of the doomsday cult that disfigures our proper concern for sustainability and good stewardship. After all, we are not God, nor did we make the world. But perhaps Murray is simply acknowledging here the role of original sin and free will in the present calamity.
An awareness of the fall is also at the root of Dickie’s lifelong fear of the apocalypse. “Maybe every era has an atrocity woven into its fabric,” he reflects. “Maybe every society is complicit in terrible things and only afterward gets around to pretending they didn’t know.” But Dickie believes that the proper solution is to withdraw from society altogether. If he can just take his family into the bunker, he thinks,
The world, the fallen world, will fall away. The toxicity that you were part of, that you made them be part of too, will be gone. The four of you will be de-worlded: no more school, news, internet: instead only the straight reality of the four walls around you, the sky overhead, the food you have grown from the soil.
This supposed idyll is disrupted when a former lover of Dickie’s threatens to post pornographic images of him online. Dickie confides in Victor, who proposes killing the man when he comes to the bunker to pick up his hush money. In Victor’s eyes, Dickie confronts pure evil:
You don’t speak—you can’t speak; nor can you look away from the splayed gaze, the eyes that angle off into other dimensions, leaving between them a space of pure emptiness, a terrible place of darkness, where you seem to see yourself, ungrounded, null.
And yet, Dickie kneels down near the bunker to wait for his blackmailer, just as he has regularly knelt in church over the years. “But how long since you prayed?” he asks himself. “Prayed and expected to be answered? Or even listened to? … Now in place of the Cross is the Bunker. You can still just about see it, sepulchral in the gloom.”
But there is a moment when Dickie could draw back: someone appears to him, someone he at first takes to be Victor.
You don’t have to do this, Dickie, he says. There is another way. … Admit what you did, her persists. Tell Maurice, tell Imelda, tell the kids. …They’ll find a way to understand. Imelda too, even her. That is what love is. It is bigger than facts. It is bigger than the sum of what you have done. You can be done with that false life, take the good things with you. Start again.
But Dickie refuses to lay down his mask as Willie has counseled, and tragedy follows. What does this say about all his future-proofing, his attempt to ward off the end of the world?
One of the things I loved best about The Bee Sting is the revolution it enacts in our perception of Imelda. At first, she appears to be little more than a gossip and a compulsive shopper. But notwithstanding her refusal to punctuate, Imelda is by far the best storyteller in the family; and despite her tragic history—the worst of which is not revealed until the very end—she tries hard to resist temptation and do the right thing. And there is hope, too, in the relationship between brother and sister. As Cass and PJ make their way home in a blinding storm, Cass asks her little brother for a distracting science fact. He tells her that, due to the flourishing biome in our gut, our bodies contain more bacteria cells than human cells. “People get so hung up on are they this kind of person or that,” PJ says.
But if you have ten times more not-human cells than human cells, then, in a way, you’re not even you. It kind of takes the pressure off…. I feel like if people knew they were mostly bacteria it would solve a lot of problems.
Cass and PJ enter the woods on this fateful night like Hansel and Gretl, trying to find their way back to the parents who have abandoned them. And this is fitting, because throughout the novel, an old folk tale has been in tension with Dickie’s doomsday narrative. A man finds himself alone in the woods at night without food or shelter. All at once, he hears the sounds of music, laughter, and dancing; a door has opened up in the hillside, and when he steps in, the celebrants all insist they’ve been waiting for him. The traveler enjoys an evening of good food and drink. But when he wakes up, one hundred years have passed, and all his loved ones are dead. PJ has been troubled for a while now by an idea that was suggested to him by the movie Pet Sematary: if you bring someone back from the dead, they might be changed for the worse. He has tried very hard to resurrect the loving father he once knew. But when they get to the woods, what—or who—will he find in Dickie’s place?
Joan Elizabeth Bauer 