The Bee Sting

Paul Murray

Hamish Hamilton, £18.99

By Rosemary Goring

Small-town Ireland is the backdrop of Paul Murray’s saga of a dysfunctional family whose troubles are blackly comic but never less than profoundly sad. Where they live is not the problem, as such, and yet it features so prominently, it is clear it must bear some of the blame. It’s the sort of place, thinks teenager Cass, where, “when you walked down the street people would slow down their cars to see who you were so they could wave to you… Their only interest, besides farming and the well-being of the microchip factory, was Gaelic games.”

She cannot wait to escape to Dublin and university, which represent liberation and adulthood. Nor is she the only one of her family feeling trapped. Her father Dickie, who runs the once lucrative local car dealership, is in danger of bankruptcy. He had as a young man hoped to pursue a high-flying career rather than be thirled to the family business, and has recently found himself in such a difficult predicament he can see no lawful way out.

At home, his still beautiful wife Imelda is in a marriage she never wanted. Only PJ, their younger child, does not want to escape. Instead, the 12-year-old lives in dread of being packed off to boarding school, and to this end tries to keep a low profile, to prevent his parents noticing him.

This, then, is the Barnes family, in whose company you will spend over 600 pages. No need to quote Tolstoy: Murray’s rococco imagination has supplied a plotline sufficiently convoluted to prove the point about the individuality of each unhappy family.

Bored or anxious adolescents are nothing new, although in his second novel, Skippy Dies, Murray proved himself the laureate of teenagers with his acute, sometimes hilarious take on these often agonising years. In Cass and PJ’s situation, however, there is less to make you smile. Their travails are the embodiment of the idea that the sins of the fathers are passed down the generations.

The novel’s title is the hinge on which this cork-screwing story revolves. On her way to marry Dickie, Imelda was stung by a bee which got trapped in her veil. Her eye was so swollen she kept the veil lowered through the entire day. Was this inauspicious beginning to their marriage the source from which all their problems have stemmed?

Nothing so simple, as Murray sets out to show. For a start, Imelda had previously been engaged to Dickie’s brother Frank, his father’s favourite, who tragically died. Since then, she appears to have moved through life as if underwater. She lives in her own world, distant from husband and children, traumatised not just by her bereavement, but by an upbringing worthy of Brett Easton Ellis (“Learning to sew by putting stitches in your brother’s head after Daddy hit him with a claw hammer.”).

Handling the plot as if it were a Rubik cube, Murray gives each character their voice in a carousel of first-person accounts, tracking backwards and into the present. What emerges is an intense, excessively detailed portrait of deep-rooted sorrow and misery; of good intentions and well-laid plans, underpinned by the shakiest of foundations.

As the backstory is gradually revealed, no clairvoyance was needed to predict that things would one day come to a crisis. What might not have been so obvious, though, was that Dickie, in his unusual version of middle-aged angst, would turn into a survivalist. As Cass reflects, he was “never the same” after she did her school project on climate change. Now, he is creating a bunker in their woods, with a mate who tries to teach the horrified PJ how to kill and skin squirrels. You might say he is nuts, and you might well be right.

There are echoes in Murray’s writing of Roddy Doyle and Jonathan Coe. His edge and his perceptions, however, are harder. There’s a fleeting glimpse of Jonathan Franzen too, in his interest in the forces that make and distort a family, and the cost to each of its members of what might be called its creation myth.

Even so, Murray’s style is entirely and distinctively his own, with throwaway lines that leap off the page. Of making conversation: “They’d try this topic and that, as if testing keys in a lock.” Of Dickie’s dad’s disdain for him after his brother’s death: “as if having lived entailed something underhand”. Of a young man’s hair: “the colour and texture of the stuffing of one of Dickie’s old teddies - a sort of beige that looked as if it was never intended to see daylight”.

By far the most compelling narrators are Dickie and PJ; trying to catch Imelda’s incessant, rambling speech by dropping full stops makes her chapters more difficult to follow rather than more vivid. Cass speaks in a believably high-octane manner, and her introspection and self-doubt, couched in the second person, feel authentic.

Yet even though she can be extremely shrewd, the passages capturing her life as a student start to flag. As always, however, there are illuminating flashes of observation, as when she describes what it is like to be young and able to become whoever you want to be: “You imagine being modern: someone unafraid, unabashed, browsing the endless midnight warehouse of desire, its shelves piled high to the roof, to pick out the package that is uniquely and comprehensively you.” By the time Cass is old enough to blame her dad for everything, there are signs also that in many ways she and Dickie have more in common than either is aware.

Old suffering and suppressed emotions underlie The Bee Sting, which are then mirrored in the present-day. Baggy, self-indulgent, over-long yet compelling, The Bee Sting is an immersion in the tragedy of what-might-have-been. Murray’s at times excessive fascination with this wretched family is pulled together rather brilliantly towards the end, where all his threads, and each member of the family, converge in a breath-taking finale.