Fly Like a Butterfly
“Dust be diamonds, water be wine
Happy, happy, happy all the time, time, time
Dust be diamonds, water be wine
Happy, happy, happy all the time, time, time”
- from the album Be Glad for the Song Has No Ending, Incredible String Band, 1969.
First lines:
”In the next town over a man had killed his family. He had nailed the doors shut so they couldn’t get out. Their neighbors heard them running through the rooms screaming for mercy. When he’d finished he’d turned the gun on himself.”
With over 26 audio reading time hours between the first and last lines, it’s no wonder that many readers thought the song had no ending. But the story does, ambiguous as it may be, like Murray’s characters the reader must decide.

It’s a rambling tale of three generations of an Irish family living in a small village, and on the face of it one could be forgiven in thinking it is just another, albeit well-crafted, Irish story that has become almost a genre in its own right.

But that is just what it is not. It’s a story about time, how the past stays with us, how people change or think they do. How we don’t realise in our moment that this is our life. There’s no returning. That’s all folks.

Imelda - the middle generation -
“Time doesn’t do what you think it will, does it? You get your turn, but they don’t tell you that’s all it is. A turn. A moment. Everything explodes, you’re nothing but feelings. Your life begins at last. You think it’ll be all like that. Then the moment passes. The moment passes but you stay in the shape you were then, in the life that’s come out of the things that you did. The remainder of that girl you used to be.”

And Dickie, Imelda’s husband, on trying to recover his past, walking through his old stamping ground of Trinity College in Dublin nearly two decades later.

“There were new buildings everywhere with obtuse designs, deliberate acts of modernity. They struggled against the university’s aura of pastness The plush heaviness like a brocade of pure time that covered everything and held it in suspension.”

Against the tales of the individual characters hangs the beginnings and forebodings of climate change and ecological damage. The piece of plastic blowing in the wind, semi attached to a power pole, that once held a memorial photo of Imelda’s first love, brother of Dickie. Frank whose ghostly presence lingers on. That plastic will, Imelda muses, outlast all our lives, all our “turns”.

Bad things seem to happen with weather changes, storms, flash flooding. But the characters literally plough through downpours and flooded roads. In sync with their doom. A come-what-may-ness. There’s an “All the world’s a stage” vibe about The Bee Sting.

A gem of a book. Read it for the prose alone. As for the characters, I came away almost in love with one of them, the boy, PJ. And I guess I’m not alone.

Read this book. ( )

The past remains with us, in all kinds of unexpected ways. If we haven't made peace with it, it will come back again and again.
p409

Yes. We had to wait for over 400 pages for what I think is the central theme of the book. This is the story of the Barnes family and their slow unravelling following the 2008 crash. Dickie the father, his wife Imelda and their children Cass and PJ each struggle with their own lives but none is able to communicate effectively with each other to share their troubles.

So, how far do you have to go back to find the source of the trauma? Back to the financial crash and flood of 2008 when everything fell apart and people started to talk about you? Back to when you got married and a bee stung you so that you didn't lift your veil on your wedding day? Back to when you were raped at university? Back to the death of your brother? Back to your childhood with a violent father and brutal brothers? Further? As the book proceeds more and more secrets are revealed particularly during the sections where each character tells the story from their own point of view. This is a very effective section with each character contained within their own section as they were in their lives unable to break out and change the journey.

It's a long book - too long - and I lost the will to live at one point when Dickie was with PJ and Victor in the woods building a shelter in survival style for a catastrophe. The thing is they were preparing for something that had started but not yet fully arrived whilst all around them the catastrophe of the family falling apart was happening right under their noses.

It's the ending that really challenges as it is ambiguous - I hate that! As the gun is lined up to shoot at someone we get the lines about doing all of this for love and you are left unsure about whether the gun is used or not. Does it lead us right back to the beginning with the opening line that mentions a family who killed someone in the next town? I can believe that the ending could be either way - shoot or not. There are plenty of issues in the book that don't happen. PJ being threatened by a boy with a hammer who will club him to death because his mother was diddled out of money by Dickie when her car was 'mended' in the garage. The threat was real but it didn't happen. Are they aiming to shoot squirrels or people? Plenty of squirrels were captured during the story and squirrels are mentioned often by most of the characters. I still don't quite understand that motif.

This ending makes it a perfect book for book club but only if people can get to the end. ( )

A very long modern Irish family saga that was overall bleak, but the message—take off your useless mask and just love the people around you, was seriously disturbed by the cop out of a non ending. Over six hundred pages and the author couldn’t be brave enough to finish the story. Post modern bullshit.

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray is a character-driven account of the many ways seemingly normal families can spin out of control and often back into sync with each other.

I'll acknowledge upfront that this won't appeal to every reader (though this statement is true of every novel) for some specific reasons. One is the length, some readers simply don't want to read something this long. I know people who squeeze perhaps 30-60 minutes of reading in on most days, which can make maintaining engagement with a long story more difficult. There will also be those readers who don't care for the multiple viewpoints expressed in ways unique to each character. They may want one voice throughout the book or don't really like getting into the heads of characters they wouldn't like in real life. So if these comments refer to your preferences, you might want to skip this book.

If you're even remotely interested in a novel like what I've described, you will be richly rewarded with this one. While the problems, some self-generated, these characters face are unique to them, they are also analogous to what most of us face. So we both follow this family and, if we read actively, reflect on some of our own life experiences. That alone makes this a successful novel for me. And this element, of the characters being similar to all of us, comes to a head in the final section when the voice changes to make them more directly us.

I would hope this doesn't need to be emphasized to most readers, but a novel, of any genre, requires the characters to make decisions or act in ways we think we would never do. That means you're not going to agree with a lot of what they do, or you'll feel the need to judge them from some (false) superior position. Don't! Empathize with them, try to understand how things could evolve to make someone make those choices. Step outside of your safe little bubble of faux superiority and care about someone, albeit fictional, different from yourself.

I would highly recommend this to readers who like to read about family, and by extension societal, dynamics from within the heads of those involved. The writing is excellent and if you allow yourself, you'll care about each character even if you're also glad they aren't in your life.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Goodreads. ( )

Powerful, moving, and intricately constructed