Tolstoy said that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way, but anybody who reads a lot of novels may well think they’ve seen every possible permutation of familial unhappiness. Not the least of Paul Murray’s many achievements in his fourth novel, The Bee Sting, is to take the overfamiliar dynamics of the stock “dysfunctional family” and make them seem fresh: for the Barnes family seem uniquely prone to making bad decisions and suppressing secrets.
Set in a claustrophobically small town near Dublin, this Booker-longlisted tale is a family saga told from the viewpoint of each family member in turn, in the manner of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. We begin with the two Barnes children, teenagers Cass and PJ, both plotting, in different ways, their escape from the family home. Fans of Murray’s marvellous boarding-school novel, Skippy Dies (2009), will know how good he is at inhabiting teenagers, and he digs deep and convincingly into both Cass, whose sense of deracination is prompting her to waste time on booze and boys instead of exams, and PJ, who fears that his parents will dispatch him to boarding school if he causes them any trouble. (He’s trying to hide the fact that he has grown out of his latest pair of trainers already, “only it’s not that simple because his socks have started to get blood on them which doesn’t come out in the laundry”.)
In the children’s eyes, their parents, Imelda and Dickie, are irritating or pathetic, and the latter’s constant squabbles about the collapse of Dickie’s car dealership – partly due to the bursting of the Celtic Tiger bubble, partly to Dickie’s heart no longer being in a business that does so much damage to the planet – make for a miserable atmosphere. Murray does a particularly skilful job of fleshing the adult pair out when he comes to tell the story from their perspectives, making them sympathetic while still recognisably the problematic figures whom their children disdain.
Murray’s last novel, The Mark and the Void (2015), was a satire on the banking industry with a plot bordering on the burlesque: novelist shadows banker ostensibly to gather material for book but actually because he’s planning a robbery. In that novel, the characters never came to life, because they were serving a story that was overbaked. Here, however, you could apply Anne Tyler’s summary of the plots of most of her novels: “Time passes.” The characters are given room to breathe, and the result is a triumph. (Nor is that to say that plot has been entirely neglected: the dangled promise of the truth about why exactly Dickie and Imelda got married ensures that curiosity is one reason to keep turning the pages.)
The Bee Sting does engage with some of the big issues of our time, but in a less strident way than its predecessor. The result is a first-class piece of immersive fiction – sharp-witted and clear-eyed but big-hearted – that doesn’t feel as if it’s in retreat from reality.
The Bee Sting is published by Hamish Hamilton at £18.99. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Books
