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.)
