Seeking the Ground in Our Day: Paul Murray’s “The Bee Sting”

Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting is an intense, six-hundred-page novel about a contemporary Irish family of four trying to find their bearings in our world of change and suffering. The power of the novel lies not only in its compelling story, but in Murray’s critique of modernity. In fact, though the story takes place in a rural Irish town and at Trinity College, Dublin, the story could easily find a home in any small town in North America, and at any university on either side of the Atlantic. The crescendoing tension of the novel contributes to the sense that we are in a world that is at risk of slipping away from us. Illusions magnified by technology, the loss of a language that can illuminate our inner life, and the soulful experience of alienation born from the decay of community have left us grasping for anything familiar upon which to build a life. There have been many essays written about why the humanities and the Western cultural tradition needs to be protected for our collective wellbeing. The Bee Sting may be considered an artist’s attempt to articulate our current state of existence with these cultural concerns in mind, and to provide a soulful reorientation for the reader.  

If there is a proverbial canary in our cultural coal mine then it may well be the life of teenagers. In The Bee Sting, teenage boys are obsessed with online pornography, violent video games, and Nazism. Random facts googled about every conceivable aspect of reality, from the sex life of bugs to the voices of whales, spurn glib conversations and speculations about essentially nothing. In the midst of the sex, violence, and cacophony of google facts, teen culture in The Bee Sting is also about projecting a cool and airtight persona to the world, masking worries about broken families and the desire to be loved and affirmed. Teenage girls, meanwhile, understand themselves to be sexual objects, and put themselves at risk with alcohol and drugs while always keeping an eye on their social media platforms. Nature offers one boy in the novel very little, because in the woods “there is no signal.” When the youngest child of the family, PJ, seeks to pray for a miracle with a prayer he found on his phone, he hopes he is not praying to a porn site, so accustomed is he to seeing porn as the primary use for his phone. The eldest child, a daughter named Cass, has no interest in communicating with her father, so he follows her on social media, reflecting that “this will be fatherhood from hereon in … just another anonymous consumer of her brand.”

Adult life in The Bee Sting does not fare any better. Infidelities threaten marriages, and people are guided by personal desires for wealth and pleasure. It is noteworthy that many of the characters, including the family of Dickie, Imelda, Cass, and PJ, attend mass regularly and have religious images surrounding them. The fascinating thing is that their religious practice has little evocative power spiritually. Neither does their faith inform them of their own soulful experiences, nor help them in their moral decision-making. Celebrities are listened to more closely than are the saints. One celebrity who had an affair with their wellness advisor chimes, “his love has woken the love in me […] He’s brought out the passionate person I thought was gone […] I feel like I’m 18 again!” Dark spirits are sometimes sensed by characters with dis-ease, and the Judeo-Christian God is spurned for either a materialist orientation or conspiracy theories in a reality that is untrustworthy and lethally dangerous. The mother of the family, Imelda, reflects that she had a plethora of Saints to pray to as a growing girl, but in her new house she drifted away from angels and religion and became interested in home furnishings. She and her new friends make materialism a kind of “private language,” showing off their purchases “like bees doing a waggle dance.” She spends money furiously to prove it is real. There is an endless supply of fresh wants. “Every situation presented itself in terms of something they needed to buy. Spending became the fuel that powered the illusion, the great machine that carried them, all of them, away from the past.”

As a grown man, the father, Dickie, wonders, “for what purpose did it serve, renouncing sin, being good?” When Dickie was seven years old, he had wanted to be a priest. But even as a boy he came to realize that no one loves anyone for being good, “except God, presumably, and even there he was beginning to have his doubts.” Dickie’s experience as a growing boy is an indictment of his culture, where everyone is drawn away from the life of virtue towards the celebration of social prestige and the successes of young sports heroes. Even when those young heroes commit a sin on occasion this is excused because it is merely “sheer exuberance” that inspires them to step over the line. The cell phone has also disturbed the world of adults. For Dickie, his actual life “seemed to recede into a shadowy hinterland beyond his phone.” Murray portrays this private, online life as claustrophobic, with characters stuck in bathroom stalls, offices, dark corners, cars, and bunkers as they live out a private life in a reality filled with false personas and a broken language filled with veiled meanings. “Today, in the developed world,” Murray writes with point-blank directness, “We are presented with a virtual world powered, literally, by the incineration of the real.”

Murray’s clarity of vision is most easily recognized when he describes university life in Dublin. At Trinity College, traditionally held public debate is reduced to technique and emotive anecdotes designed to trick an audience, the substance of tradition or carefully reasoned arguments lost in public discussion. A leading intellectual on campus was a student who had surrendered to desires and had been “hollowed out by them, and made incapable of any serious role in the world of men.” Dickie had once understood a counter-cultural bar called The Butterfly to be “a sacred place, where beneath the surface froth deep truths were forged. Now he could see it too was pretense, performance,” people there “using facts about the real world to make it look like they cared about it, to make themselves look like serious people while they larked about and positioned themselves for fat jobs in law and the media.” When friends tried to communicate seriously, they relied on the cheap psychology of Hallmark greeting cards. It was, reflected Dickie, “the season of the self.” In response to this hollowed-out existence where one put their dignity in harm’s way through sexual licentiousness and alcohol abuse, Dickie “wanted flagellation; he wanted punishments; he wanted someone to knock some sense into him.”   

Dickie’s memory of Trinity College and his daughter Cass’ on-going experience at the university run parallel to one another, and reflect the vacuous nature of public and intellectual life generally. In The Bee Sting Murray’s subtle portrayal of student life demonstrates that it takes very little effort to opine on any subject, and even less effort to deconstruct a culture. One girl has a heavy text book on her lap for her gender studies course, but she stares into her WhatsApp instead of reading the book. A popular professor on campus asks, “is language racist?” while students in the lecture theatre stare into their computers, updating their Instagram accounts. While waiting for the next good time, a student takes up Twitter causes with half of her attention on the phone, half in the real world, protesting military rule in Egypt one moment, the next, protesting “non-Mexicans wearing sombreros.” Famous poems are rejected out of hand with cynical superiority, because they celebrate nature without ever protesting the ongoing threat to nature by global warming. Regarding the roving personas we can purchase for ourselves, and the confused sexuality of our day and age, Cass’ friend says, “It’s just part of being modern… you don’t have to accept what society presents you.” Later the same friend asks about a sweater she wants to wear out, wondering, is it “too non-non-binary?” Cass tries to imagine being modern, “someone unafraid, unabashed, browsing the endless midnight warehouse of desire, its shelves piled high to the roof, to pick out the package that is uniquely and comprehensibly you.” On campus “There were new buildings everywhere, with obtuse designs—deliberate acts of modernity that 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.”

Murray is not a nihilist. He offers insight into not only what disorients us, but what can save us. He reminds the reader that there are young people who are grounded and hopeful. Interestingly, two characters, Sarah Jane and a German theology student, live on the periphery of mainstream culture. Sarah Jane lives on a “farm up in the hills,” and is poor. She knows interesting things, and looks critically at cultural trends. Meanwhile, the German theology student is simply aloof to the judgments of contemporary culture. “It’s funny,” Cass reflects, “she seems like a loser, but she acts like she doesn’t know or care if she’s a loser.” As the novel’s crescendo continues to intensify, Murray also offers the reader reminders about our right place in the cosmos. In consecutive chapters there is a proper sense of reckoning, the adult protagonists ending their musings with “God forgive me!” and “My God, my God.” In a moment of Voegelinian insight, Dickie recognizes that his obsession with conspiracy theories and apocalyptic disasters has ballooned as his faith in God has deteriorated, so that “now in the place of the Cross is the Bunker.” Dickie has attended mass regularly over the years, but now he wonders when the last time was that he actually prayed. Without even intending to, he suddenly finds himself in a conversation with Jesus:

“Loneliness can make people do terrible things,” Jesus says.

“You never thought for an instant you would be this lonely, did you?”

In the face of Dickie’s sufferings Jesus counsels, “There is another way.”

“Tell the truth.”

“Love… is bigger than facts.”

“You only have to trust in the people who love you.”

“You only have to open your heart up to love.”

The crux of Murray’s story comes down to whether Dickie will listen to the words of Jesus, or not. For the reader, Murray has tried to evoke a response from us. Can we turn from the noise and haste of our hollowed-out world and learn to ground ourselves again in divine love? Can we follow the path between our fallen world and the divine mystery that shines a light on the pilgrimage we endeavor to live with faith, love and hope?

The Bee Sting
By Paul Murray
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023; 656pp

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