The Rural Literature Book Club is meeting online for the fifth time on Sunday, September 29th, 2024, 6pm GMT/ 1pm EST. Join people from all over the world to discuss The Bee Sting by Paul Murray.
About the Rural Literature Book Club
You can join the Rural Literature Book Club here, or email RyanDennis@themilkhouse.org to receive the Zoom link.
The conversation is friendly, inclusive and insightful, and generally lasts about an hour. The group meets online three to four times a year.
Previously discussed books include The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison, Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee and Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.
To help facilitate discussion and get the wheels turning, here are 15 book club discussion questions for The Bee Sting that we might discuss if the group is interested.
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
1). The first line of the book foreshadows the ending. How many people remembered the first line by the time they got to the end?
2). What structural choices did Paul Murray make in the book? Why do you think he made them? Do you think they were effective?
3). Why do you think Imelda’s sections did not include punctuation? Do you think that was a useful strategy by Murray?
4). What role did the flood play in the book? In what ways did water become a harbinger of bad things in the plot?
5). From the reader’s perspective, which character did you empathize with the most? Did any characters seem more or less believable than others?
6). Why do you think that the actual town that the Barnes live in is never named? Because Dublin is a very specific place in the book, does that set up any particular rural-urban dynamics?
7). Why do you think the story keeps returning to the folklore of the traveler who was lured away by fairies, feasted, and then woke up to find everyone in his life gone? Does that speak to the characters’ lives in any way? To Ireland?
8). In what ways are environmental concerns used in the book? Why do you think Murray did that? Was it effective?
9). How is The Bee Sting in dialogue with other books that address the post-Celtic Tiger economic crash in Ireland? Does it add anything new?
10). What are the similarities and differences in the ways that Dickie and Cass address their sexuality?
11). Why do you think Murray chose this title? What is the “bee sting” emblematic of?
12). Why do you think Ryszard is not Irish? Is it merely to make it plausible that he can leave town without being noticed, or can there be another impetus behind that decision?
13). Which would you argue is a more devastating inherited force in the book: 1). The trauma parents pass onto their children, or 2). External shared conflicts such as climate change, economic recession, anti-gay prejudices, class structure, etc?
14). If you could only use one word to finish this sentence, what would it be? “This book is about ____.”
15). If the book was a few pages longer, what do you think we would find out? What do you think happened in the end?
Feel free to add your own questions in the comment section…