Dickie knew that this was a pivotal moment: he could feel it, literally, the room swaying ever so gently up and down, as if it were balanced on a point - listing towards one future, then another.
The Bee Sting
by Paul Murray
Genre: Contemporary
About: A family is headed towards a crisis - the father failing at business, the mother tempted into an affair, the daughter binge drinking her way through exams, and the son making plans to runaway. They have each reached their blackest point. But is it from the decisions they're making today, or did past events curse this family and is there any hope of breaking it?
Thoughts
This book makes so much sense to be on the Booker Prize shortlist, and to have received all its other prizes and praises. Each POV is so distinct and the novel expands in such an original way. Cass's POV has this poetic desperation that can only come from teenage hormones. PJ keeps you worried throughout the novel as his childish imagination and innocence has him stumbling onto darker paths. Imelda had perhaps the most difficult POV to read, with it's endless stream of thought and no punctuation. And Dickie read a little bit like PJ's but a sadder, more broken version.
I do think the first act was probably a bit too long, but it did firmly attach me to the characters, which worked really well for then switching to the more impersonal second person. By this point I knew each of them and what they were up against so well that this dreamlike, zoomed out perspective still engaged me.
And then the third act. The pace rams up and my heart was in my throat. Everything is coming to a head. The storm pelts down and we don't know what's going on, characters are reunited, characters are fighting, characters are searching, characters are poised to kill... My eyes couldn't dart across the page fast enough, and you know what? I still don't know what happened.
That's ultimately the reason why this wasn't quite five stars for me. Even that I though I loved the writing and thought the switches on perspectives was so original. Even that I loved the characters and the details given to them. Even that I loved that the tone was both real and dreamlike, that it could make me smile and then twist a knife through me. The balancing act was brilliantly done until that ending. Because it wasn't an ending. We don't know what happens to any of the characters. It's more like the bullet hits the reader and if the author truly wanted to leave it ambiguous like that, I think it could at least have ended with Cass's poem. Guided us a little more towards something, even if it was symbolic.
Overall, I thought this was great but the pacing didn't work for me. Too much build up for too little pay off. It felt incomplete to me, although I enjoyed the journey it took me on.
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