The Bee Sting Paul Murray

A tragicomic triumph

Clocking in at more than 600 pages, Paul Murray’s Booker shortlisted novel 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.

Murray is exploring the way families can always sense the emotional temperature, even if they don’t know where the fire is coming from. He is brilliant on fathers and sons, sibling rivalry, grief, self-sabotage and self-denial, as well as the terrible weakness humans have for magical thinking, not least in regard to the climate crisis. He can also create a laugh-out-loud moment from a buttock tattoo or the simple sentence, “He said he was thinking of only listening to Angolan music from now on.”

The Bee Sting draws on Irish folklore about a traveller taken in by fairy folk to their great hall of riches under the hill, only to wake many years later in a cold, unfamiliar world where everything they knew and loved has passed away. He uses it as a figure for the unsustainable mania of the Celtic tiger, for the piercing nostalgia surrounding lost youth, for the vanishing of illusions and shared fairytales that allowed this particular family to function. Toward the book’s end, Imelda thinks back to the horrors of her chaotic childhood, the past she can never escape, all that has brought her, second by irrevocable second, to this present moment. “You would give anything to go back to it anything.” You won’t read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year.

Justine Jordan

£9.29 (RRP £9.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop