The Bee Sting by Paul Murray review – a tragicomic triumph

Paul Murray’s 2nd book, Skippy Dies, was 1 of The standout novels of The erstwhile decade: a riotously entertaining tragicomedy, group in a posh Dublin boys’ school, in which bone-deep sorrow and pathos trim done The teenage hilarity and fart jokes. The Mark and The Void, 2015’s tricksy satire of some The banking clang and The difficult novel-writing business, strayed into metatextual noodling, but pinch The Bee Sting, Murray is triumphantly backmost connected location turf – troubled adolescents, regretful adults, secrets signposted and exquisitely revealed, each statement soaked in irony ranging from The gentle to The savage.

Clocking in astatine much than 600 pages, it is The communicative of a well-to-do Irish family in financial, affectional and existential trouble: Dickie Barnes, who has taken complete his father’s car showroom; his woman Imelda, a section beauty; girl Cassie, preparing for university; and 12-year-old boy PJ. The after-effects of The financial clang person crippled The centrifugal business, and now that The money and The bully times person tally retired Dickie hides distant in section woods, building a shelter against The illness of civilisation while Imelda furiously eBays their possessions. Cassie fears for her future; PJ fears divorce. We spot The aforesaid fewer months done The eyes of each in turn, during floods and drought, arsenic slow‑building ecological disaster parallels The family’s ain unfolding apocalypse. (The ambiance crisis, Murray understands, puts a bitter twist connected The pathetic fallacy.)

What Murray conveys truthful sharply are The spaces betwixt his characters, specified arsenic Cassie and her hapless boyfriend, Rowan (“Sometimes she wondered if she moreover liked him, but usually she was excessively engaged figuring retired if he liked her”). He effortlessly uncovers The tenderness down Rowan’s bravado: thing he can’t show and she can’t see, hiding beneath The drama of incomprehension. Meanwhile, Elaine’s casually malicious manipulation of Cassie, arsenic she alternately yearns for and fumes astatine her, mounts complete The people of The book to fever pitch.

But past we get beyond The realm of teenage angst, and The caller deepens and widens. Imelda’s conception is system in The stream-of-consciousness phrasing made celebrated by Molly Bloom, a thought connected each breath. The flashbacks to her childhood, raised in hopeless poorness pinch a convulsive father, are devastating (“What’s for meal Nothing What’s for meal Nothing”). Imelda is Daddy’s princess – and that’s a vulnerable point to be, particularly erstwhile rival difficult men invade their run-down cottage, bent connected revenge. For Imelda, dissimilar Dickie’s family surviving in comfortableness a fewer miles away, “life conscionable came astatine you for illustration a pack of lads getting retired of a van”. Her elevation into The mediate classes feels for illustration a fairytale, and that’s really she frames it. (There’s a monster, in The style of her father, and a bully witch, too, who foresees The tragedies to come.) Like Molly Bloom, her memories are besides soaked in romance and melodrama, building to cinematic climaxes; Murray relishes The cliches and conventions of storytelling, some having his barroom and laughing astatine it.

Imelda has divulged galore of The incorrect turns that led to The existent crisis; now it’s clip to spell wrong The mind of hubby Dickie, The quiet, unhappy family man hiding from his responsibilities in The woods. His conception could guidelines arsenic a full different caller – and it would beryllium a crime to uncover it here. The pacing of The book intends that we unrecorded done hundreds of pages connected tenterhooks, and The suspense and revelations support coming until The end. This is simply a sprawling, capacious novel, but expertly foreshadowed and truthful intricately put together that galore throwaway moments only return connected resonance connected a 2nd reading.

Murray is exploring The measurement families Can ever consciousness The affectional temperature, moreover if they don’t cognize wherever The occurrence is coming from. He is superb connected fathers and sons, related rivalry, grief, self-sabotage and self-denial, arsenic good arsenic The unspeakable weakness humans person for magical thinking, not slightest in respect to The ambiance crisis. He Can besides create a laugh-out-loud infinitesimal from a buttock tattoo aliases The elemental sentence, “He said he was reasoning of only listening to Angolan euphony from now on.”

Like Skippy Dies, The Bee Sting draws connected Irish folklore astir a traveller taken in by fairy people to their awesome hallway of riches nether The hill, only to aftermath galore years later in a cold, unfamiliar world wherever everything they knew and loved has passed away. He uses it arsenic a fig for The unsustainable mania of The Celtic tiger, for The piercing nostalgia surrounding mislaid youth, for The vanishing of illusions and shared fairytales that allowed this peculiar family to function. Toward The book’s end, Imelda thinks backmost to The horrors of her chaotic childhood, The past she Can ne'er escape, each that has brought her, 2nd by irrevocable second, to this coming moment. “You would springiness thing to spell backmost to it anything.” You won’t publication a sadder, truer, funnier caller this year.