“If you stay in Ireland and you don’t leave, you can be my age [48] and have friends from school and that’s great. But there’s a flipside to that,” says writer Paul Murray
“He wakes up and he’s destroyed. And how is he destroyed? He’s still alive and walking around. But it’s 100 years later, and he’s taken out of time. He’s removed from his family. He’s alone. And he’s devastated.”
The Bee Sting is set in an unnamed midlands town during the 2008 recession. The Barnes family, who rode a high during the Celtic Tiger with a thriving car dealership, are now trying to keep up appearances while the business goes under; and looked upon with suspicion by their neighbours. As we delve into the backstory of each character, it becomes clear they’ve staked their identities on fragile myths, and that those myths will have to unravel.
Being alienated from community – and, for that matter, stopping being a person – are ideas Murray describes in a different context in his recent essay. While on a fellowship in Boston College, he was asked to write a fish-out-of-water style piece on the Metaverse , for New York Magazine. He donned his VR headset and, from his office, visited virtual bars and comedy clubs and socialised with the avatars of people who were also wearing headsets in their own homes, across America.
“Technology’s mostly about getting us to be working all the time. And then the social element is mostly a sop you’re given, or a way to sell you stuff,” he says. “The Metaverse was Zuckerburg’s attempt to put the lid on that and just completely close it off. So: I now own friendship. As literal as that.”
His undergraduate alma mater, Trinity College Dublin, appears in The Bee Sting, as “this glittering world of difference”, and his own experience was likewise like stepping into another world.
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