The Bee Sting

 Today, in the developed world, the great threat to political order is that people will pay attention to their surroundings. Thus, even slaves have access to entertainment. You could even say we are paid in entertainment. The novel was the first instance of what in the 21st century has become a vast and proliferating entertainment industry, an almost infinite machine designed to distract us and disempower us. We are presented with a virtual world powered, literally, by the incineration of the real.

Or so says Paul Murray in The Bee Sting--a novelist, oh by the way, and thus culpable by his own word 😉. But he is right, isn't he? Like it or not. 

I began my reading of this novel with, I will admit, a prejudice against it, despite the handful of impressive awards it had won. That doesn't always mean much, these awards, I mean. And the title seemed somehow insufficient, fuzzy. Moreover, I gathered from the blurbs on the book jacket that this was a family saga sort of thing, and that is not generally my cup of tea. 

But this novel is good. Well okay, it is more than good. It is brilliant. And it is in many ways, both concrete and implicite, about the incineration of the real, the triumph of the inessential, a tragicomedy that will keep you reading obsessively from page one to page 643 (in my paperback edition). I meant to dislike it; instead I loved it. It is quite simply one of the best novels I've read in the last 10 years.