Paul Murray’s second book, Skippy Dies, was one of the standout novels of the previous decade: a riotously entertaining tragicomedy, set in a posh Dublin boys’ school, in which bone-deep sorrow and pathos cut through the teenage hilarity and fart jokes. The Mark and the Void, 2015’s tricksy satire of both the banking crash and the difficult novel-writing business, strayed into metatextual noodling, but with The Bee Sting, Murray is triumphantly back on home turf – troubled adolescents, regretful adults, secrets signposted and exquisitely revealed, each line soaked in irony ranging from the gentle to the savage.
Clocking in at more than 600 pages, it is the story of a well-to-do Irish family in financial, emotional and existential trouble: Dickie Barnes, who has taken over his father’s car showroom; his wife Imelda, a local beauty; daughter Cassie, preparing for university; and 12-year-old son PJ. The after-effects of the financial crash have crippled the motor business, and now that the money and the good times have run out Dickie hides away in local woods, building a shelter against the collapse of civilisation while Imelda furiously eBays their possessions. Cassie fears for her future; PJ fears divorce. We see the same few months through the eyes of each in turn, during floods and drought, as slow‑building ecological disaster parallels the family’s own unfolding apocalypse. (The climate crisis, Murray understands, puts a bitter twist on the pathetic fallacy.)
The first section belongs to teenage Cassie, embroiled in a toxic friendship with golden girl Elaine, both desperate to escape a small town where people “slow down their cars to see who you were so they could wave at you”. We’re in similar territory to Skippy Dies here, as Cassie and Elaine discover guys and booze; even more so in section two, as PJ mopes around in the woods to escape the atmosphere at home and tries to avoid a beating from a bully. Like the boys in Skippy Dies, PJ is skewered by adolescence, caught between imaginary and video games, sweets and porn, fantastic facts about nature and dark fears for its future. If something that seemed as certain as parental love and material security can crumble, why not the whole world? He explains the need for a bunker in the woods to his sulky friend, Nev:
Like say if the grid went down. Or if there was a swan attack.
A what?
Like a, uh, black swan attack?
What the fuck? Nev says again. Where are you getting this shit?
What Murray conveys so sharply are the spaces between his characters, such as Cassie and her hapless boyfriend, Rowan (“Sometimes she wondered if she even liked him, but usually she was too busy figuring out if he liked her”). He effortlessly uncovers the tenderness behind Rowan’s bravado: something he can’t show and she can’t see, hiding beneath the comedy of incomprehension. Meanwhile, Elaine’s casually malicious manipulation of Cassie, as she alternately yearns for and fumes at her, mounts over the course of the book to fever pitch.
But then we get beyond the realm of teenage angst, and the novel deepens and widens. Imelda’s section is structured in the stream-of-consciousness phrasing made famous by Molly Bloom, a thought on each breath. The flashbacks to her childhood, raised in desperate poverty with a violent father, are devastating (“What’s for breakfast Nothing What’s for dinner Nothing”). Imelda is Daddy’s princess – and that’s a dangerous thing to be, especially when rival hard men invade 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”. Her elevation into the middle classes feels like a fairytale, and that’s how she frames it. (There’s a monster, in the shape of her father, and a good witch, too, who foresees the tragedies to come.) Like Molly Bloom, her memories are also soaked in romance and melodrama, building to cinematic climaxes; Murray relishes the cliches and conventions of storytelling, both having his cake and laughing at it.
Imelda has divulged many of the wrong turns that led to the current crisis; now it’s time to go inside the mind of husband Dickie, the quiet, unhappy family man hiding from his responsibilities in the woods. His section could stand as a whole different novel – and it would be a crime to reveal it here. The pacing of the book means that we live through hundreds of pages on tenterhooks, and the suspense and revelations keep coming until the end. This is a sprawling, capacious novel, but expertly foreshadowed and so intricately put together that many throwaway moments only take on resonance on a second reading.
Murray is exploring the way families can always sense the emotional temperature, even if they don’t know where the fire is coming from. He is brilliant on fathers and sons, sibling rivalry, grief, self-sabotage and self-denial, as well as the terrible weakness humans have for magical thinking, not least in regard to the climate crisis. He can also create a laugh-out-loud moment from a buttock tattoo or the simple sentence, “He said he was thinking of only listening to Angolan music from now on.”
Like Skippy Dies, The Bee Sting draws on Irish folklore about a traveller taken in by fairy folk to their great hall of riches under the hill, only to wake many years later in a cold, unfamiliar world where everything they knew and loved has passed away. He uses it as a figure for the unsustainable mania of the Celtic tiger, for the piercing nostalgia surrounding lost youth, for the vanishing of illusions and shared fairytales that allowed this particular family to function. Toward the book’s end, Imelda thinks back to the horrors of her chaotic childhood, the past she can never escape, all that has brought her, second by irrevocable second, to this present moment. “You would give anything to go back to it anything.” You won’t read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year.
• The Bee Sting by Paul Murray is published by Hamish Hamilton (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
