The Bee Sting by Paul Murray – a Bee Sting and a Dog’s Life

The Bee Sting is a novel by Paul Murray, shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. Set mostly in a small Irish town not far from Dublin, it unravels the tangled history of the Barnes family, who have enjoyed decades of wealth and local influence, thanks to their VW dealership. Now, leaner times have arrived.

There is much looking to the past in The Bee Sting, and I’ll start with some personal nostalgia the book provoked in me. Believe it or not this involves the TV show Friends. Fairly early in my read through, I recalled the moment where Monica, squeakily indignant about something or other, causes Chandler to advise her, ‘only dogs can hear you now’.

Let me explain.

We begin in the present day, focusing on teenager Cass Barnes and her relationship dramas. For a few months, she has a boyfriend called Rowan, who, though no Oscar Wilde, does occasionally come out with some interesting facts. One of his observations involves dogs and their sense of smell. Dogs have a hugely better sense of smell than humans, which, as Rowan points out, would make their perception of past and future different to ours.

‘They must have a whole different understanding of time, because for them the past is literally still around. When a dog looks at the world it must see all these presences gradually fading out. Like a sky full of contrails.’

You could say the perspective of The Bee Sting is like that of Rowan’s dogs. In fittingly freeform writing which might lack full stops, or muddle together first, second and third person narration, things do not simply start and finish. Past hurts linger, hidden aspects of personality re-emerge, eccentric ladies with psychic abilities see events in advance, like a dog picking up a scent long before their human owners are aware of anything.

I pondered on this doggy outlook. Rowan thinks it’s a good thing, because from a scent-centric point of view, the nice times in our lives tend to stay with us for longer. There are also suggestions throughout the book that looser perception might make us more tolerant and collaborative. I thought this an interesting idea, but I did have some reservations. If you are taking dogs as a model, then forgive me if I come over as a canine pedantic, but they are pack animals just like humans. Their floaty, nasal insights don’t stop them snarling at each other and engaging in doggy violence. A lost owner is lost, even if their scent lingers. A bereft dog is still bereft. And as for the suggestion that thinking in terms of the olfactory, might give a pointer towards more openness and collaboration, well there’s the irony that a dog’s sense of smell is often involved in territorial marking. Picky? What can I tell you. The dog thing, which serves as a template for much of The Bee Sting, didn’t quite work for me.

Still I got the point. And there’s also the fact that dog perception isn’t simply held up as a standard we humans should aim for. When psychic Rose foresees bad things happening, these premonitions are characteristically marked by the appearance of a ferocious-looking black dog. Dogs are presented as ambivalent, both helpful and frightening. Maybe The Bee Sting, in the way of good novels, is not writing some kind of prescription for how we should see the world. It’s more a picture to be looked at from different angles. Seeing things in less defined terms is useful, until the potential for confusion brings its own problems.

I started out wondering if this was a book with a message that only dogs could hear, but ended up feeling that The Bee Sting could find an appreciative human audience. Though its central idea might be a bit of a stretch, generally speaking it’s a woof from me