Murray has written a book that could remain one of [this century's] greatest novels ... Anyone who starts The Bee Sting will be immediately absorbed ... Extraordinary ... Although Murray is a fantastically witty writer, his empathy with these characters is so deep that he can convey the comedy of their foibles without the condescending bitterness of satire. His command of their lives is so detailed that he can strip away every pretense and lie without spoiling a surprise ... The great miracle of The Bee Sting is the way Murray propels this story forward while simultaneously looping back into the past.
The Bee Sting...ought to cement Murray’s already high standing. Another changeup, it’s a triumph of realist fiction, a big, sprawling social novel in the vein of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. The agility with which Murray structures the narrative around the family at its heart is virtuosic and sure-footed, evidence of a writer at the height of his power deftly shifting perspectives, style and syntax to maximize emotional impact. Hilarious and sardonic, heartbreaking and beautiful — there’s just no other way to put it: The Bee Sting is a masterpiece.
This all may sound bleak, but Murray’s writing is pure joy — propulsive, insightful and seeded with hilarious observations...And in this ailing family, there are shining moments of incredible love. Through the Barneses’ countless personal dramas, Murray explores humanity’s endless contradictions: How brutal and beautiful life is. How broken and also full of potential. How endlessly fraught and persistently promising. Whether or not we can ever truly change our course, the hapless Barneses will keep you hoping, even after you turn the novel’s last page.
[A] theme of uncanny returns ... Murray shows off his formidable range, immersing us in worlds so distinct and textured that they seem to blot one another out—subjectivity and how its wonderful thickness can lead people astray being one of this author’s preoccupations. Early chapters are propelled by a sustained sense of revelation. As the details pile up, irony, both caustic and elegiac, flourishes in the knowledge gaps between characters ... The adult chapters are less cute; they are thornier, more treacherous, and formally more ambitious, using stream of consciousness to invoke the shattering power of grief and lust ... As the book continues, the Earth’s climate and the apocalyptic climate of the Barnes family appear almost to merge, as what began as a coming-of-age saga pulls in stranger and darker forces, twisting into a tornado strong enough to rip away the thickest veil.
An ambitious, high-drama family saga with a surpassingly propulsive plot in no way confined by the novel’s domestic setting ... A novel this action packed risks feeling ungainly, shambolic. But the world of The Bee Sting is spacious and three-dimensional enough to handle it, in part because Murray, in his fourth novel, seems to have at last settled on a balanced theory of the origins of contemporary bourgeois unhappiness ... The Bee Sting’s accomplishment—a major one—is to bring together the family and the economy as truly intertwined subjects, into a double helix of oikos and oikonomia that twists toward dread.
To note that this novel is Irish is to call up another, more flattering generalization: stylistically it’s outstanding, defined by supple, engaging prose and a preternatural sense for storytelling ... the new novel, while frequently funny, has more serious intentions. Mr. Murray has always been able to dazzle and entertain, but he has never before developed characters with this much depth or capacity for tragedy. So richly detailed is The Bee Sting that it reads like four books woven into one ... Through a succession of suspenseful twists and feints, Mr. Murray advances the stories of the characters individually and then collectively, in a bravura final section that draws all four together. It’s only in a final coup de theatre, when coincidences bring about a literal four-way collision, that the drama feels heavy-handed, manipulated rather than organically unfolding. But by this point, we have spent so much time with the characters that our investment in their lives has been vouchsafed ... In the faltering mixture of candor and deception, helplessness and desperate prevention, Mr. Murray creates a heightened but truthful portrait of family love.
Murray is a natural storyteller who knows when to withhold, to indulge, to surprise. He specialises, like Dickens, in lengthy sagas that are mammoth in scope, generous with detail and backstory, flush with humour and colourful characters, all of it steeped in social realism ... This new book is an amalgamation of the author’s previous work, at least thematically ... An ambitious, expansive novel. There are shifts in perspective, tone, voice, era and milieu ... For the most part, The Bee Sting is hugely entertaining tragicomic fiction.
A sharply written family soap opera that oozes pathos while being very funny to boot ... The novel’s energy comes from the steady crackle of dramatic irony generated by what characters don’t know about one another ... It can’t be overstated how purely pleasurable The Bee Sting is to read. Murray’s observational gifts and A-game phrase-making render almost every page – every line, it sometimes seems – abuzz with fresh and funny insights ... Key to the book’s success is the breadth of generational experience that Murray’s imagination seems so smoothly to inhabit.
Murray is triumphantly back on home turf – troubled adolescents, regretful adults, secrets signposted and exquisitely revealed, each line soaked in irony ranging from the gentle to the savage ... We get beyond the realm of teenage angst, and the novel deepens and widens ... You won’t read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year.
When recommending Murray’s earlier masterpiece, Skippy Dies, I often tell friends not to be daunted by its doorstop-ness. The book is so inventive, so funny, so extravagantly entertaining, that to worry there’s too much of it is like worrying that one’s marriage might be too happy. What a problem to have! In The Bee Sting, Murray is working in a less fizzy, more portentous mode, and there were times I missed the puckish humor that kept Skippy’s motor running...But if The Bee Sting is a little more serious, well, we live in serious times, and it’s heartening to have a writer with Murray’s energy devoting such attention to contemporary life. The Bee Sting is 645 pages of close observation, encouraging readers to identify the disconnections and miscommunications that plague us all, the small personal disasters that our fear and dishonesty transform into apocalypses.
Murray fails to bring the same stringency, the same quality of bullshit detection, to his own procedures as he does to the illusions of his characters. This is the first time he has confined himself to the conventions of a literary genre ... Amid all the coincidence and circularity, the conspiring bad omens and dovetailing dramatic ironies, Murray doesn’t just struggle to find a viewpoint from which to oppose the superstitious mindset; he seems to be embracing it ... Has traces of social satire and observational comedy, but many of the jokes don’t land ... [An] air of fatalism.
You could complain that there’s a formula to this stuff: sentimentality undercut by absurdist comedy; nihilism leavened by love. But as soon as you feel yourself being manipulated, you’re awed by a beautiful sentence ... By turns funny and corrosive, portentous and poignant, The Bee Sting is a symphonic family saga that puts its characters — and the reader — through the emotional wringer.
[Murray's] prose pops from the page, precise and piquant, biting in its gallows humor. He's astonishingly versatile, tapping internet influences, stream-of-consciousness technique and social realism.
It is not the size of these themes that dictates the expansiveness of Murray’s fiction, but – as his latest title suggests – the particularity of the writing. A small incident may trigger, or symbolize, the derailing of whole lives ... Is The Bee Sting too long? The first four sections, each devoted to a different Barnes family member, may be more expansive than seems justified by the events they chronicle. But Paul Murray is consistently inventive, observant and funny. He is on intimate terms with this preteen boy, this teenage girl, this lost middle-aged man and this semi-educated woman, and he knows how to make them vivid. For the final 150 pages he switches to the second person for all four characters, in increasingly short sections; the pages turn rapidly as farce and tragedy converge, the latter threatening to get the upper hand.
Many achievements ... Does engage with some of the big issues of our time, but in a less strident way than its predecessor. The result is a first-class piece of immersive fiction – sharp-witted and clear-eyed but big-hearted – that doesn’t feel as if it’s in retreat from reality.
A triumph ... Murray excels at the confusions and comedy of young adulthood, and the intensity of teenage friendship ... It is generous, immersive, sharp-witted and devastating; the sort of novel that becomes a friend for life.
Another huge, marbled wagyu steak of a novel that confidently ranges from humane to horrifying ... On the narrative turns, carefully paced, brilliantly convincing and helped along by plenty of subtle satire. Murray captures ironies and parallels between the family members and environments ... As with everything else in the novel, the truth turns out to be much bleaker and more complicated. It perfectly encapsulates Murray’s skill for swings from gentle comedy to deadliest seriousness. Leave the worthy comparisons to Joyce aside: this may not be a groundbreaking book, but it is an immensely enjoyable piece of craftsmanship with an expert pair of hands on the tiller.
It is every bit as cutting a depiction of the foibles, minutiae, and everyday deceptions of Irish life as his previous work ... Turns...sombre tone towards depicting not only the various private hells each member of the Barneses must endure, but also the self-deceptions needed just to get through the day when the world is on fire ... Contains little... solace ... Unsparing ... confess that I wish he’d applied his natural comic touch more liberally to The Bee Sting, and wonder what a slightly streamlined version of this novel—or one where the author went a bit easier on his characters—might look like.
An immersive, brilliantly structured, beautifully written mega-tome that is as laugh-out-loud funny as it is deeply disturbing ... As ambitious as anything that has gone before, but with a focus and shape that grants it great depth as well as breadth.
Murray allows his plot lines to fluctuate along soft curves while the narrative slithers back through itself, revealing new information ... Murray’s narrative control is fully ripe, but the stylistic control is lacking. Vivid, microscopic details are often outmatched by overly-emotional brushwork.
Capacious, funny and modestly unconventional ... Just as Murray’s flawed, exasperating, distressingly human characters discover, once you figure out where things are inevitably heading, it’s far too late to stop.
Furthers his reputation as a writer of tragicomedy without peer ... Their stories are relayed over successive chapters, often in exquisite detail, and brought to vivid life, each with their own distinctive cadence, along with an amalgam of attendant eccentricities and gripes ... Both brilliant entertainment and a penetrating look at the human condition, as heavy with pathos as it is rich with humour. And if 650 pages asks a lot of the reader, in this case it more than delivers.
[A] saga of a dysfunctional family whose troubles are blackly comic but never less than profoundly sad ... The novel’s title is the hinge on which this cork-screwing story revolves ... Murray’s style is entirely and distinctively his own, with throwaway lines that leap off the page ... Baggy, self-indulgent, over-long yet compelling, The Bee Sting is an immersion in the tragedy of what-might-have-been. Murray’s at times excessive fascination with this wretched family is pulled together rather brilliantly towards the end, where all his threads, and each member of the family, converge in a breath-taking finale.
The Bee Sting is always compelling, the kind of novel that is so skillful it can become an obstacle to sleep ... Some readers might reasonably wonder why the sections from Imelda’s point of view book omit all punctuation except question marks ... Other readers might feel that the propulsive drive forward in the plot, especially at the end, although invariably engaging, feels soap-opera-ish ... The Bee Sting might not be perfect, but it’s great fun to read. And perfection is overrated.
Not since Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life has an author tormented characters in a doorstop of a novel as entertaining as Paul Murray's breakneck page-turner The Bee Sting ... [an] endlessly inventive work.
The third act veers into a baroque tragedy, as Dickie continues work on the bunker and the reader tries to understand how the Barneses got to this point ... The questions aren’t always enough to sustain the story, but their open-ended nature provokes readers to hang on to the end.
