My Thoughts
What a ride! The Bee Sting first section is an easy to read depiction of an (on the way to being formerly) wealthy Irish family as seen through the eyes of teenage daughter Cass, in her final year of secondary school, eager to escape to university in Dublin. The context is grim:
- Cass is mired in a co-dependent friendship that threatens her future and intensifies her self-destructive impulses.
- The family’s finances are failing in the wake of the Great Recession.
- Her father Dickie is increasingly retreating obsessed with climate change and constructing a bunker to survive the inevitable ensuing calamity.
- Her brother PJ is sensitive, naive, and tormented by bullies.
- Her mother Imelda, a renowned beauty with spending habits to match, is struggling with ever-increasing desperation to maintain appearances to the town, her friends, her family and herself.
But the narrative is nonetheless LOL1 funny, and I was hopeful the rest of the book wouldn’t fall off as so many do.
I wasn’t disappointed. There is no decline in quality. The laughs, however, fade quickly as the book unfolds, moving forward, backward, and spiraling in time, each segment featuring a distinct narrative mode and style suited to the perspective—and psyche—of the family member.
The Bee Sting is a tour de force of craft, construction, and story…a story that is increasingly fragmented and heartbreaking through its violent2 crescendo.
Commonplace Quotes
Cass
The Tidy Towns Committee, of which Cass’s mother was a member, was always shiteing on about the natural beauty of the area, but Elaine did not accept this. Nature in her eyes was almost as bad as sports. The way it kept growing? The way things, like crops or whatever, would die and then next year they came back? Did no one else get how creepy that was? I’m not being negative, she said. I just want to live somewhere I can get good coffee and not have to see nature and everyone doesn’t look like they were made out of mashed potato.
Cass couldn’t deny it: she had been disturbed by the project. It wasn’t just the garage; she was up to her neck in climate change too. Looking at Instagram, eating an ice cream, switching on a light: her most casual act left a toxic trace behind – as if she had a marauding shadow-self that choked the very world she lived in.
She was a tragic figure, but she didn’t seem to see it. She had a grandiose manner, and was fond of using long, exotic words – bagatelle, mellifluous, distinctive – like weird drapey silks you might find in a box in your grandmother’s attic. Her actual clothes, however, were not drapey; she wore a combination of dungarees and frilly blouses, a look that Elaine called ‘Victorian petrol station’.
Suddenly Elaine was a different person, chic, cosmopolitan, older. Not like a poet, not like a college student; more like a girl who lived in a big city, and worked in an art gallery or an advertising agency, someone who got up at 6 a.m. to do Pilates, and then went out onto a balcony in a towelling robe cupping her coffee in her hands.
Imelda
Then as Imelda stepped onto the floor they had left clear for dancing she saw something flash through the back of the room Fleeting white faceless Drawing closer Coming straight towards her through the dark A shimmering bright haze As it rose from the guests At last she thought for what else could it be And her heart rose too soared sang she made for it it made for her At last she thought for one blissful instant Till she saw Dickie there at the apparition’s side and she realized It was her reflection Her own self in the mirror at the back of the room In her veil and white haze of lace That’s all it was Then she understood She was the one Rose had seen in her vision She was the ghost A leftover from another life A remnant of something that was no more That was her Haunting the feast And Dickie placed his hands on her hips and the band began to play…
probably turned straight to steam But the plastic that’ll be there on that pole when you’re all dead and gone Isn’t that what the kids are always telling you Use it once then it’s hanging around for a thousand years 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 will all be 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 be that is gone They don’t tell you How could they How could anyone make any sense of that
Leave the rights and the wrongs out of it Tell them what it’s like to be held again to be desired How you feel his wanting you like an electric charge That it lights everything up like a house that has lain empty and now is all ablaze But how afterwards it’s worse than before because now the darkness knows it is darkness the emptiness knows it’s emptiness the poor house knows there’s nobody home
PJ
He looks down at his feet, raw and red and sorrowful. His feet look back at him like, Please don’t put us back in those runners, PJ! He sighs. I’m at my wits’ end with you, he whispers.
It’s not their fault, they can’t help growing. But he only got these runners two months ago and it was a really big deal then and he can imagine what Mam will say if she has to go and buy more. So he’s keeping quiet about it, only it’s not that simple because his socks have started to get blood on them which doesn’t come out in the laundry. He’s been hiding them in his locker so Mam won’t notice but sooner or later he’s going to run out, and what will happen then he doesn’t know, except that it won’t do him any favours if they end up getting divorced. Who would want a boy with infinitely expanding feet?
The funny thing is he knows they won’t send him to boarding school. Cass has explained it several times. Boarding school is expensive, and the whole reason they’re fighting is that they have no money. But though this all makes sense in his mind, he just can’t seem to believe it, in his heart.
PJ continues to his own room, takes off the muddy trousers. His head pounds where Ears kneeled on him, where the barrier fell. But thankfully nothing left a mark. He smiles into the mirror. Hey, Granddad, would you like to support me in a sponsored run? It’s ten kilometres, people are mostly giving five euro per kilometre.
He looks like he needs a blood transfusion and a heart transplant. So much for the best way to get money is to look like you don’t need it.
Here’s a fact about the universe, maybe the number one fact: it’s impossible to comprehend how much it doesn’t care about us. It’s not just that it doesn’t care about Life. It doesn’t even care about matter. Everything we think of as everything – starlight, marshmallows, frogs, basketball, electricity, every single person who ever lived and died, all the stuff there is and all the energy – that’s only a minuscule fraction of the universe. The rest of it is darkness – dark energy, dark matter, which are just words scientists use for ‘we don’t know what this is’. What we call the universe is basically a microscopic speck on this giant incomprehensible darkness, like a piece of lint on an XXXXXXXXXXL-size sweater, and life is like a nano-sized speck on that speck.
So when you think about it who cares about saving it, or anything in it, because basically none of it was ever even supposed to be there. Cass was right about that.
Dickie
Maybe every era has an atrocity woven into its fabric. Maybe every society is complicit in terrible things and only afterwards gets around to pretending they didn’t know. When the kids ask, tell them that no one meant any harm.
Dickie had never felt quite the same way about cars; he’d been regularly travel-sick as a child. Still, he’d always assumed that on graduating he would be returning home to join his father in the dealership. It had simply never crossed his mind to do otherwise.
Now for the first time he wondered. On his walks in the woods he tried to picture what it might be like to do something different, be someone different.
After the cold snap that caused such chaos in his mother’s garden the forest floor had turned white with frost, and crunched grudgingly under his boots. His leg hurt when he put weight on it, and the cold made the cuts on his face sting, but in the grey light of November the woods were even more beautiful than before. 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. It felt like everything was too busy to pay any attention to him and he felt a great sense of relief; also because it heralded a deeper emptiness, a deeper silence.
You find these stories oddly consoling – cosy, even, like listening to the rain fall from a warm bed. It’s as if for you the shit has already hit, the flood, the famine, whatever shape it takes. Outside, the world has drowned, and the desolation swaddles you like a blanket.
In fact before very long stepping out of the forest and going into the house comes to feel weirdly like playing a video game. You watch the walls and furniture track past you, you watch your hands float through space, reaching up in front of you and grasping things in the cupboards which then follow the hands down through the air. When PJ appears or Imelda it’s with the same sudden, bewildering luminosity as the squirrels in the heat vision scope. Similarly, on your way back into the woods you experience the strange dissonance you used get as a boy, when after switching off your computer you’d find the movements and colours and cues of the game world still imprinted vestigially on the real.
You will not be racked by guilt, your children will not sense any difference in you, you will not be estranged, exiled. The fact is that people do terrible things every day and the world goes on, they commit atrocities, and then resume their ordinary humdrum lives. In real terms a death is practically non-existent. It’s simply a case of seeing that, of seeing things as they are.
With this eerie clarity, that is akin to weightlessness, you start to make your way back. But what is the way back? In the light of the phone all you can see are trees, skeletal white and eye-socket black, teeming around you thick as the rain.