The Bee Sting and the lack of inevitability
And a few other links to things
Over the past week, I devoured Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting. I am vocal about my hunt for Franzen-like stories, and that is what got me to this yellow-covered delight on the Booker 2023 shortlist.
The novel is about the Barnes family, living in an unnamed Irish town a few hours from Dublin. The Barneses’ car dealership, once the enterprise that made the family among the town’s richest, is in freefall after what is hinted as being the 2008 financial crisis — and around the business’ freefall is also the family’s. Dickie seems unable to fix the holes in the business, his wife Imelda spends her days finding things at home to sell, their daughter Cass spends her evenings getting progressively drunk, while the son PJ is perfecting his plan to run away. All four are disastrous at communicating with each other.
One of my favourite things about the book was its willingness to go further and further back to investigate where the Barneses’ supposed “string of bad luck” begins. And during its journey backwards — through Dickie’s college and Imelda’s childhood — it turns into a book of things that never happened. There’s a degree of entropy to everything that leads to everything else that leads to the family being where they are. Right down to the book’s climax, there is no definitive answer to Barnes situation, just like there is no way to say when the situation became a situation.
Which brings me to the other favourite thing about this book: its end. The end is a resolution more than it is a climax. In those chaotic moments in the woods where the story closes, its characters all seem to take a deep breath, square their shoulders, and say well, we’re in it now. It is also a very literal end: true to the novel’s promise, down to the very last words, the family remains suspended in their freefall. Imelda’s and Cass’ resolve might save them or it might not. Dickie’s choice might be it or it might not. None of that matters, The Bee Sting seems to say: none of their lives went as planned, why ever would you think they have an inevitable end?
I also read Anuradha Roy’s An Atlas of Impossible Longing, another family novel. It includes a lot that is now extremely familiar in Indian family novels: a grand house, now decaying, an ageing matriarch/patriarch, politics (typically Partition or post-Independence politics) penetrating the house, and questions of inheritance. I don’t dislike any of these devices, and they have in the past come together to form novels I adore. Atlas, for me, suffered simply by circumstance — if I’d read it in 2008, I would be taken by its freshness. That said, Roy’s prose is beautiful, and I can’t wait to read more of her very soon.
A few good things
“We were after the so-called “friction of terrain.”” — This five-part travelogue on bicycling through Southeast Asia by Kyle Hemes (2, 3, 4, 5).
These early photos of Marlon Brando.
A very fun new Vampire Weekend album, actually.
I’m now reading Srinath Raghavan’s India’s War, a history of Indian participation in and encounter with World War II, and also, in a larger sense, what the war did to/for the flow of South Asian history. Among the things I promised myself I’d do this year was return to reading history, especially that of the subcontinent. It has been a good run so far, with Sunil Amrith’s Unruly Waters and Steven Wilkinson’s Army and Nation among the other exceptional ones I’ve read in the past month.
Also, for those of you in India (and at the expense of sounding like an iNfluENCer — please check when you’re constituency is voting, and do vote! My very dispersed family is voting in parts starting April 19, right down to the very last phase. We’re a family of journalists, invested professionally and thoroughly in the electoral process — and I can assure you that once you work your way through the clutter, election season is among the more interesting events of the year. Vote, if only to find out just how long that unique Madras ink purple stays on your finger.