How anger saves the characters in The Bee Sting

In Paul Murray's much talked-about novel, anger arrives at just the right moment to offers its young protagonists hope

For most of its 600+ pages, The Bee Sting is a story that vibrates with its characters’ anxiety and shame. The Barnes, an affluent Irish family, are rocked by the 2008 financial crash and suffocating under a mounting pile of secrets. Father Dickie is running his business into the ground. Mother Imelda is contemplating an affair. Their two children, 12-year-old PJ and high school graduate Cass, are worried about their warring parents and facing their own uncertain futures.

Shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 2023, Paul Murray’s novel – with its distinctive title and yellow jacket – has become the word-of-mouth hit of the past 12 months. It has been the stock recommendation of my partner Jessie – who has read everything – whenever anyone asks what they should read next; when I mentioned it in the GQ office recently, half the team’s ears pricked up. Funny, inventive and cleverly plotted, The Bee Sting has gathered the kind of authentic momentum that makes you briefly recover your faith in the novel as a cultural force.

Perhaps even more unusually, it is a book that gets stronger as it reaches its climax. The dread swirls around Murray’s characters heightens as the narrative alternates between them in shorter and shorter bursts, like a tense game of pass the parcel. By the last page, it is uncertain whether the Barnes have found something like a happy ending – or perhaps, a happy new beginning. But on the final stretch, its two youngest characters are granted reprieve from the novel’s overarching sense of doom and familial fatalism. These moments arrive, not in acts of love or joy, but flashes of brilliant, life-enhancing anger (spoilers ahoy).

PJ’s last line of defence

When we first meet PJ, he is a sweet boy and a bag of nerves. Neglected by the rest of his family, he exists in the blurred lines between the internet and real life, between gaming with his friends, the mundanity of online chatrooms and pornography, and the offline problems of school bullies and lonely, listless walks in the nearby woods. He is also so afraid of upsetting his parents – particularly his money-obsessed mother – he disguises the fact he has outgrown his shoes so badly they’re making his feet bleed.

PJ is a naif in mind and deed. So he doesn’t think to question an online friendship with a stranger claiming to be a fellow school boy called Ethan. Ethan has kind, loving parents, all the latest computer games and ready access to a zoo. He also communicates in block capitals and excessive emojis which read like an adult’s impression of a kid, because – as the reader realises with a sickening lurch – that’s precisely what he is.

Towards the end of the novel, PJ travels to Dublin to visit Cass at her university digs, alone and unannounced. When she turns him away in embarrassment, he’s cast out in the city streets at night. Lost and desperate for somewhere to stay, he messages Ethan who immediately offers to collect him. It’s one of The Bee Sting’s tenser scenes, even if you never quite believe Murray will send his character into the clutches of an internet predator (at its core, this is a book about the damage done to us by families, not strangers). PJ stands on a street corner waiting and spies a creepy-looking adult – who we presume to be the real Ethan, though the penny hasn’t quite dropped for PJ yet – walking towards him “in this very eerie gliding kind of way” while “staring the way your parents always told you is not polite to do”.

You wait for some sort of rescue to take place – and it arrives, in the form of a beautiful upswell of rage.

you feel your cheeks burn which is annoying because why should you be blushing if he’s the one being rude, why should you be ashamed, it’s all back to front. And suddenly you are angry, like angry at this fucking weirdo, but angry at Ethan too for being late, and at Cass for ruining your plan, and Mam and Dad for wrecking their marriage, and Zargham and Nev and Julian Webb and whoever else, there are so many people to be angry at

It’s the first time in the entire book we see PJ’s anger – even though he is the character with the most to be angry about – and he uses it to propel himself into action. He turns and runs away.

In Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) – one of the first texts to take understanding emotions out of the hands of religion and morality and put it in the grasp of science and reason – Charle Darwin observed the role anger plays in protecting us. He made the distinction between what he called ‘depressing’ and ‘exciting’ emotions, and placed anger firmly in the latter category because of how it “impels people and animals into energetic motion.” To illustrate this he used the example of a mother defending its young (animal or human). It is anger, Darwin argued, not maternal care or duty that makes them stand and fight. Love may be the reason to defend what is important to us, but anger is the propulsion we need to actually do it.

In PJ’s case, it’s anger – not fear or worry – that gets his legs moving. A sudden sense of fury on his own behalf, not just at the stranger threatening him but his parents, sister, the school bullies and everyone else who has led him to this point.

Cass’s self-respect

Older sister Cass, meanwhile, has been bullied by her high school best friend Elaine her entire life. Elaine is beautiful and popular, and switches callously between lighting Cass up in a blaze of love and rejecting her when someone more interesting comes along. This pattern of abuse plays out for Cass’s entire adolescence, during which time she develops a form of Stockholm Syndrome and falls secretly in love with Elaine, something Elaine senses and manipulates.

Now living together as students in Dublin, Cass and Elaine have a house party. As their home fills with drunk strangers, they get into an argument in which Elaine says unthinkable: the girls have drifted apart and she thinks they should no longer be friends. This moment of shattering rejection is interrupted when PJ shows up out of the blue. After chasing him away, Cass returns to the party drunk and confused and determined to find Elaine and mend their bond. She finds her sat flirting with a boy.

So you know each other well? he says. Elaine looks at you the way she does when someone else is looking at her looking at you. You could say that, she says. We did almost get into a three-way once, didn’t we, Cass? Her hand closes around yours.

In this moment, Cass finally sees it: how Elaine treats her like a prop to be picked up and put down.

Don’t touch me, you say.
She starts. The boy with the videos looks confused. You are confused too. The words just came out, you don’t know where from. But suddenly you’re overcome with revulsion, like you’re looking in a mirror and your reflection is rotting. You okay, babe? Elaine asks. You don’t know what to say back. Except you do. I hate you, you say. By you of course you mean yourself, in the mirror, but there’s no time to explain that. Your hand is still in hers, you tug it free, then you turn and you run.

The confession Cass thought she had to make – that she loved Elaine – comes out as a deeper, opposite truth: she despises her and their rotten union. The fury and resentment Cass has buried for years comes to her aid at just the right moment to protect her from further humiliation. Like PJ, she acts on her anger and runs away. The siblings find each other and board a bus home, at which point – despite her social life lying in apparent ruins – Cass feels happier than she has in months.

The best novels understand how emotions conduct the symphonies of our lives, sometimes in how we respond to them deliberately, but more often through unconscious acts. I love that the biggest novel of the year has something so perceptive to say about anger – or perhaps, the absence of it. PJ is turning into a textbook people pleaser. Cass resents everyone except the cruel best friend who truly deserves it. Both learn that, at crucial moments, anger can rally to our sides, even if we’ve kept it dormant for a long time. Seen and understood clearly, anger is not there to irritate or misdirect us, or even punish the wicked in the world. It’s there to remind us of our self-worth and give us the energy to defend it.

It’s no accident the siblings have their moments of reckoning at same point in the novel’s timeline. The Bee Sting is a carefully structured story that shows how families are built in layers of legacy. Before the kids were born, grief and responsibility robbed Dickie and Imelda of their chance to realise who they truly are and what they really want. Can PJ and Cass break free of that cycle? If they do, anger will play its part.

Good Anger, a book about how anger can enhance our lives, is out 5 June 2025 and can be pre-ordered here.