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.
