The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

Developing Character through Visual Transformation

In this extraordinary 500 page novel Murray examines the lives of a contemporary Irish family, and though the story contains many surprising developments, nothing within the plot feels arbitrary or overly expansive. Through four different third person voices and over a span of many years, the narrative is consistently engaging, without any lags or slowdowns. How does Murray keep the momentum so strong?

I believe it’s because he has a singular and simple purpose: to investigate the far-reaching effects of a decision two characters make in response to an event, early in the novel, that disrupts their lives. All of the subsequent problems the novel reveals are, in some way, the result of that original life-changing decision. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to talk about the structure except in these general terms because specifics will give too much away, and one of the many pleasures of The Bee Sting is to experience a backstory packed with surprises. I will say only that as the full arc of the story became clear at the very end, when I could see how each plot turn was tied to that original choice, I understood the elegance, coherence, and overall beauty of its narrative design.

A pleasure I can talk about is the depth and focus of each new character development. We come to know the characters not only through their interior thoughts, spoken dialogue, and outward actions, but also visually. We see them through Murray’s rich visual imagery, and there are wonderful sentences linking them to the rural Ireland where they live: “In the meadows, the cows kneel in the dry grass exhausted (318). Surreptitiously, this image also expresses Imelda’s exhaustion, an accumulation of the unending hot weather, bad economy, and her worries about her husband’s business. Or here, where nature seems to urge Dickie to return to Dublin: “White leaves sparkled on the ground, like sequins fallen from a gown; the birds called to each other with a note of urgency, as if they were late for an appointment. There was an air of departure, of Nature clearing out for the winter” (396-7).

Part of the visual imagery is the novel’s overarching theme of beauty and ugliness. Three of the characters are considered beautiful: Imelda, a wife and mother; Elaine, a student who is a good friend of Imelda’s daughter, and Frank, the town’s golden boy, a brilliant athlete and a charismatic people-pleaser. There are also three characters who are ugly: Willie, a student at Trinity who becomes a friend of Dickie’s; Imelda’s father, a retired fighter and impoverished trash hauler whose drinking exacerbates his brutality, and Cass, Imelda’s plain and socially awkward daughter. And though the ideal beauty that the three afore mentioned characters possess is the first thing we learn about them, the novel then explores the less desirable traits their beauty makes possible: Frank’s sense of invincibility, leading to alcohol and drugs, Imelda’s blindness and naiveté, and Elaine’s manipulation of her friend Cass.

What is deeply unexpected is the transformation of the ugly characters. Willie becomes beautiful through his spoken voice, as suggested by his mouth: “His lips are weirdly pretty” (506), Cass thinks when she sees him in Dublin. Imelda’s father, a raging, angry man becomes beautiful when he is flummoxed by grief, and even Dickie loses his physical awkwardness when he’s in the throes of sexual lust. We know each character visually so well, that the barest reference (i.e. Willie’s lips) brings to the reader’s mind the total picture. Consider this passage from Imelda’s pov as she thinks about her father: (To show how her thoughts run together without pause, the sentences in her sections lack end punctuation.) “Yes Daddy could be very hard when he got in a rage He was on disability now but he used to be a fighter and his arms were like the carcasses she’d see hanging in the butcher’s van with the heads still on them” (188). And compare it to this one when the unexpected has happened and he’s overtaken by grief: “By Christ Daddy said His voice gave way She turned in surprise to look at him His fist was clenched. He was pounding it gently against the top of the door frame He had tears in his eyes… and his belly shook with sobs” (265-66). His complete capitulation to grief not only moves us, but changes our sense of him, because it competes with the idea of him as a bully berating everyone around him, especially his children.

Consider this first visual description of another ugly man, Willie: “The boy was quite conspicuously ugly. He had hair the colour[sic] and texture of the stuffing of one of Dickie’s old teddies—a sort of beige that looked as if it was never intended to see daylight—ruddy cheeks and pale eyebrows dominated by a pair of enormous tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses. His eyes were large and cobalt blue; his nose was large too, and blunt, set over a pair of bow lips that were unnecessarily red and shapely, almost as if he’d been wearing lipstick. The lips would probably have looked very nice on someone else, Dickie reflected, but here the fragment of perfection just added to the overall sense of chaos” (338-9). Compare it to a view of him thirty pages later when Dickie, a new student at Trinity College in Dublin, sees another side of the man who will become a friend: “And Willie was, of all these prodigious young men, the most prodigious. He knew the most, he was the funniest. He spoke in a melodious, bell-like voice that was at once sonorous and gently self-deprecating, just as his speeches, studded with quotations, allusions, Latin aphorisms, were somehow both learned and bashful, so the force and brilliance of them hit you only gradually; it was like drinking lightning, very slowly, from a wine glass. In this setting, even his ugliness took on a new light; it gave him a kind of aristocratic bearing, a seriousness and authority, as if beauty and such fripperies were beneath him” (368).

In the end, the most interesting thing about the theme of beauty is its reversal. What was beautiful turns ugly; what was ugly turns beautiful. The same can be said for kindness and cruelty as the novel, in the fullness of its narrative arc, makes us understand in a last, dramatically staged and unfinished action.

Murray, Paul. The Bee Sting. New York: FSG, 2023.