Irish author Paul Murray made his debut in 2003 (An Evening of Long Goodbyes) but didn’t find wider attention until his second book, 2010’s boarding school comedy Skippy Dies. Next came The Mark and the Void (2015), a post-crash metafiction involving a writer by the name of Paul. His brilliant new novel lays a plausible claim to Murray being Dublin’s answer to Jonathan Franzen. A 650-page slab of compulsive high-grade entertainment, The Bee Sting is a sharply written family soap opera that oozes pathos while being very funny to boot.
Set after the 2008 crash but also moving four decades into the past, the story toggles between the perspectives of husband and wife Dickie and Imelda and their children, Cass and PJ, a rural Irish family much gossiped about now that Dickie’s car dealership is on its uppers.
It adds to the torment of 17-year-old high-school leaver Cass, already desperately hungry for approval from her manipulative best friend, Elaine, whose own father, Mike, a philandering cattle merchant, has a predatory eye for the business opportunities created by Dickie’s impending ruin – to say nothing of the sexual possibilities created by Imelda’s discontent. Meanwhile, no one in the family is looking out for 12-year-old PJ, secretly cramming his growing feet into old shoes several sizes too small so as not to further strain the family purse.
They all pray that Dickie will go cap in hand to his father, Maurice, who left him the business to play golf and take the sun in the Algarve. But the amount of water under the bridge between them makes that prospect fraught – just how fraught is the subject of various flashbacks seeded through the novel, but suffice to say that Imelda was once engaged to Dickie’s younger brother, Frank, the golden child, a talented footballer who died in his teens.
The novel’s energy comes from the steady crackle of dramatic irony generated by what characters don’t know about one another; Murray skilfully conceals his hand regarding a host of buried secrets and reframing narrative twists without seeming coy or turning the novel into a guessing game. He has a knack, too, for rescuing his characters from the brink of disaster only to tip them agonisingly deeper into peril, fuelled by a potent combination of bad luck and dire decisions. You truly feel the jeopardy, not least when PJ is threatened by a violent schoolmate who says Dickie has ripped off his father and that he’s going to beat the boy senseless with a hammer, live-streamed, if PJ doesn’t personally stump up the cash.
It can’t be overstated how purely pleasurable The Bee Sting is to read. Murray’s observational gifts and A-game phrase-making render almost every page – every line, it sometimes seems – abuzz with fresh and funny insights, but always in the service of advancing the story. He dials right down the self-referential shenanigans of The Mark and the Void, though this too is a very finely patterned novel, every character’s arc a funhouse reflection of another’s. We see them needing to be seen, and loved; the tragedy of the book is how that doesn’t happen, and how the choices the central figures make end up being exploited by minor characters who are vulnerable in turn.
Key to the book’s success is the breadth of generational experience that Murray’s imagination seems so smoothly to inhabit. He’s convincing whether he’s writing about the sexual recklessness of a midlife crisis, awkward schoolboys hunched over their consoles or teenage girls out on the lash. And he’s also a demon plotter – tying up any number of dangled threads in a nail-biting finale centred on Dickie’s involvement with a doomsday prepper encouraging him to build an underground bunker.
There’s a rangy thematic reach here – post-crash Ireland; the spectre of environmental catastrophe; the hazards of class-climbing – but at its core this is a novel concerned with the oldest cliches: the ties that bind, secrets and lies, love and loss. They’re all here, brought to life with captivating vigour in a first-class performance to cherish.
• 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
