September
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The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
Books about car dealers don’t often feature in the Booker Prize. In fact, I think this might be a first. Australian author, Peter Carey (himself the son of a car dealer) wrote two cracking books featuring car dealers but neither of them made it to the literary podium like The Bee Sting.
In this case, Dickie is the boss of a Volkswagen dealership in rural Ireland, having taken over from his father in the ’90s. To put it lightly, he is not the right man for the job. He has none of the classic ‘deal making’ traits of a car dealer – no charm, no interest in customers, no knowledge of cars, no loyalty to the family business…and it’s the recession.
As Dickie and the dealership unravel, so too does his wife and their two teenage children each privately dealing with their own, deeply worrying personal crisis and trauma. Money is running out, secrets are about to be unearthed and things are spiraling fast.
Structurally, The Bee Sting is a lot like Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections with a multi-perspective family approach, where we learn about the background of each character one by one.
The Bee Sting is an incredible read. It’s dark, unsettling, a teensy bit quirky and thoroughly immersive. Personally, I think the second half is written better than the first so I encourage any soft starters to push right through to the unpredictable end.
And that’s my 2 cents worth.
Readhead 