Ghosts of the past

Like it or not , the past is always embedded in our consciousness. You remember what you want to remember but the past is always an integral part of you. We are the sum of our experiences, good or bad or neither good nor bad.You cannot go back in time, you can only live in the present. But when your present is in crisis, the cause may well be rooted in something lurking, possibly unresolved in the past.

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray is amongst the fictions short listed by the Booker Prize 2023. It is 650 pages long. The story begs the question : If you wanted to change your story, how far back would you go? As you read the story, you want to finish it and yet you do not want the story to end. By the time you are half way through the book, you are very much invested in the characters and you want to know how their lives will turn out in the end. But there appears to be no conclusion.

The Bee Sting is about the Barnes family residing in a small town outside Dublin. The primary characters are Dickie, his wife, lmelda and their two children, teenage Cassandra and twelve year-old PJ . The author has succeeded in making a bleak and depressing story into an engaging read where you will empathize with the characters as they stumble and make poor choices in their life journey.

Dickie Barnes, is failing his father’s once lucrative car dealership business and his beautiful wife Imelda who is known to be a shopper is now selling off some of their possessions on eBays. They have lost money partly due to the financial crash. Cassie, top of her class, while preparing for university has taken to partying and drinking as she fears that her family will not be able to sponsor her studies. She embroils in a toxic friendship with malicious Elaine, a rich golden girl in the same neighbourhood. They both are desperate to escape a small town where people “slow down their cars to see who you were so they could wave at you”. She does not quite get along with her adolescent brother PJ who fears that his parents may get a divorce. Dickie escapes his responsibilities and financial woes by hiding away in local woods, building a shelter to combat climate change in anticipation of the collapse of civilisation.

The author has dealt in details each character’s past. Dickie is the brains of his family. He is an unhappy family man who is struggling with some dark secrets of his own. Imelda’s section is structured in the stream-of-consciousness style without any punctuation. She was raised in desperate poverty with a violent father, but she is Daddy’s princess and that poses some danger for her as rival hard men turn up at their run-down cottage, bent on revenge. For Imelda, unlike Dickie’s family living in comfort a few miles away, “life just came at you like a gang of lads getting out of a van”. Enters an aunt who is clairvoyant and is protective of her. There are many secondary characters such as Dickie’s father and brother, Frank who was Imelda’s beloved, sadly he died in an accident.

PJ is in need of parental love. As both his parents appear to be struggling to cope with their chaotic past, and to avoid beating by a bully, he is on the brink of escaping to Dublin where he has befriended someone online through playing video games.

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray is an excellent read about contemporary life. It is sad, thought-provoking and funny in a tragic way. Some sections of the narratives are in third person, some are in first person and towards the end the narratives are in second person. It is one of the fictions that I would like to give a second reading in the future. The ending is ambiguous. Here is a conversation between Dua Lipa and Paul Murray about The Bee Sting.

The Snow in Kuala Lumpur by Daryl Lim is a melancholic and realistic tale about two cousin brothers growing up on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur in the 1960s. Young and bookish Ah Tat dreams of life outside their kampung so he studies hard and enters the university. He becomes an engineer.His cousin, KC is charismatic and streetwise, drops out of school and gets involved with the local triads. He goes missing for years and when they meet again in Kuala Lumpur, KC is well connected with powerful underworld tycoon and gangsters. Instead of getting KC to change his wayward behaviour and out of the wrong crowd, he embroils himself in rivalry with his cousin for status, influence and wealth. To top it all they both vie for June Teh’s love.

The Snow in Kuala Lumpur by Daryl Lim is set in Malaysia against the backdrop of the early years of independence. As it spans from the sixties to the nineties, the nation goes through changes and it highlights the May 13 event that happened in 1969 and the main character’s experience of being a minority in Malaysia. There are no winners in pursuing wealth and power. The Snow in Kuala Lumpur is Daryl Lim‘s debut novel. A commendable read.