The Bee Sting

This novel is about an Irish family of four who are under stress following the 2008 financial crisis. They are doing dumb and secretive things which make sense from their points of view.

Cass is a teenager on the eve of exams, focused on friendships and relationships as she gets ready to leave home.

Her 12-year-old brother, PJ, is on school holidays that seem to go on forever as he hangs out with a less than satisfactory friend, his sister barely talks to him, and the house is full of swirling tension between his Mum and Dad, Imelda and Dickie.

Imelda is on Dickie’s case to get help from his rich father to sort out the garage’s finances. Cass sees Imelda as shallow and focused on all the things she can no longer buy.

Dickie keeps clear of Imelda by spending long hours at his failing car sales business, before turning his attention to building a hut in the woods with his weird survivalist friend, giving PJ a chance to hang out with him.

Along the way, we learn how Dickie ended up running a business and marrying a wife he isn’t suited to. As the novel moves forward, it’s the parents’ stories that really grips with lots of painful but well-seen, funny-from-the-outside moments, as well as love stories and losses. We know why each character is acting as they do – while also seeing how their family members react based on their limited knowledge.

It’s funny and harsh as it exposes our human condition of misunderstanding each other.

The novel builds to a crisis with all four members of the family straining as far as possible away from each other – with jeopardy facing all of them – before miraculously returning to face each other in a colliding narrative.

One of the book’s reviewers likens this novel to a cathedral, and it does have an expansive, airy, large quality to it, with light refracted through the stained glass of multiple perspectives. It’s a cathedral of imperfection – and acceptance of that.