Achievable Miracles: An Interview with Paul Murray
by Tadhg Hoey
Reading Murray’s latest, The Bee Sting, put me in mind of Tolstoy’s line about how all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. It follows Dickie and Imelda Barnes, who are bound together by a tragic death that changed the course of their lives two decades ago, as they struggle to keep their family together. To make matters worse, their two kids, Cass and PJ, are hatching plans to leave home, and Dickie’s car dealership is on the brink of collapse. The Bee Sting is a novel about family, secrets, love, and the lengths to which we’ll go, for better or worse, to protect the ones we love from the truth. It is, above all, a novel about the past and our inability to ever outrun it.
The following is from a conversation I recently had with Paul. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Structurally, The Bee Sting reminded me of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. We start off with a single family member. Each has a section tied to their perspective. We’re introduced to Cass, then PJ, then Imelda, and Dickie. We cycle through them, and each time we return to a character, our perspective of them has been coloured by the details or the impressions we’ve gleaned from other characters’ sections. Each character’s emotional payoff will often be delayed until a later section, which has the effect of heightening that payoff. The initial sections are long and we spend a lot of time with each character. As the novel progresses, we move through the characters quicker. By the end of it, it reads like a play, with characters getting single sentences. How much of the structure was planned, or did you uncover it organically?
I love The Corrections. That was definitely an influence. Also, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. But, it just started off with Cass. It was all very organic. I'd love to say that I had some master plan. The big decision I made was that it wasn’t going to have a Skippy-like voice. Skippy Dies has an omniscient narrator, so you're going in and out of people's heads, but then there’s alsoan overarching unseen third person saying: here's what happens in the ping-pong room, or whatever it might be. Initially, I was going to do that. So you’d be told about the town and how people transact their lives with the [Barnes] family, from the omniscient perspective. But it just felt like there was going to be more of an edge to it if I stuck with the characters.
Each of the characters has this very developed sense of themselves, and how their lives are rolling, and how their world is, and how the other people around them slot into their lives. But as we go through the book and start to see those same characters from another family member’s perspective, you realise that there's massive gaps in how they see the world around them but also in how they see themselves. So it introduces this shifting foundation that you come to understand is what a family is. There’s no way to actually unite the different perspectives, but at the same time they all inform each other and supplement each other and contradict each other.
The incompleteness of anyone’s perspective — obviously that’s something we all know, objectively speaking. But it really hit home to me when I had a child. You know how people are always saying this will change your life, and that will change your life? New city, new job, new relationship, and yet your life doesn’t feel all that different. You start to suspect your life is basically unchangeable. When my son was born, though, everything changed. Literally everything in my life was different. My relationships with my wife, with my friends, my relationship to work, to time—macro and minor things. I think one of the big things that changes is your relationship with your parents. I saw them as these colossal lawgivers, whose decisions came down from on-high, and I saw myself as this essentially passive person doing as I was told and fielding whatever edicts were coming down.
Then when I had a child I realised that — how can I put this? Children are hard work. They’re very demanding! They’re looking for things all the time, they’re unhappy with various elements of their lives, and you, the parent, find yourself scrambling around trying to satisfy them. So it feels very reactive. You don’t feel in control at all! And you realise, or I realised, that this must have been how it was for my parents, and that that perspective was essentially unreconcilable with my own take on my childhood. As we go through the book, you realise that there's massive gaps in how the characters see the world around them, but also in how they see themselves.
We encounter the parents first through the kids. They seem like two nags. Then, as you read on, you realise what's going on with them, and a lot of it the kids don’t have privy to.
That's just it. As I was writing Cass's piece, I was starting to get ideas for Dickie’s, Imelda’s, and PJ’s sections. Insofar as I had one big structural idea, it was that the first two sections were going to give a very superficial image of the parents. You think: oh, the parents are just dicks, then you get to their sections. When you're a kid, you basically think the world started with you, right? You know they your parents had lives. You’ve seen pictures of them with stupid facial hair or idiotic clothes. But you really don’t imagine them as real people. Then like I say, when you get older, and when you have a kid, your sense of time changes. Or maybe it’s not dependent on having a child, maybe it’s an effect in part of hitting middle age. But you do develop a sense that life went on before you, and that the things that happened before you were born are still happening.
The children have this relative sense of time, whereas the parents have this bigger, absolute sense. Cass and PJ get flashes of this. Their journey towards uncovering what has happened to the family is really interesting. There’s a scene early on with Cass where a man in the pub brings up Frank, whom she knows very little about — let alone how Frank relates to Dickie and Imelda. Did you go into it with this structure in mind? I know Skippy Dies was originally 1,000 pages. You cut a third of it. How was the editing process with The Bee Sting?
I was expecting to have to make a lot of cuts, because the book came in at 650 pages. It's harder to sell a long book. People are wary — I'm wary — of them, even though I love long books.
You've written four of them.
Well, yeah, I should listen to my own advice, but I like long books. I like getting lost and having that relationship over time with a piece of work. Sometimes you can read a short novel and if you don't get on with it, it can feel like much more of a slog than a long book that you do connect with. I was expecting the publishers to say, well, look, the world has changed — it's just not going to be commercially viable to do a book like this, but they [Hermione Thompson at Hamish Hamilton; Mitzi Angel at Farrar Strauss Giroux] didn't have that attitude at all. They were really into it.
With Skippy, there were so many different characters and so many ways you could go. Every single thread, story, or digression was carried right to the end of the book in the initial draft, which is what made it so long. And there were some set pieces that weren't necessary, but were fun to do. There was stuff that could go, in short. Whereas this one is focused on the family. It's all through the lens of the family members, and as such. Hermione didn't feel like there was like a lot of flab to it. It was more a case of making sure everything connected up. It's very ‘plotty’ and she had a few ideas for how I could tighten it and give it more of that sort of tesseract-y quality. That was really exciting to me. The only time I really felt bad about the book was when I did the word count at the end of the first draft. I was like, oh, Jesus Christ, I've done it again.
[Laughter]
Why can't I stop this? And thinking this is going to be a problem, but no, that didn’t turn out to be an issue. It’s pretty tight plot-wise, so the editing process was mostly fine-tuning things.
All of your books have been incredibly funny — particularly the first two. There are a lot of great jokes in here but I feel there's a bit less levity. Was that in any part to do with the subject matter? Though Skippy Dies, which was hilarious, was also very dark.
I didn't set out with any of those books to make them funny, necessarily. It’s just what was coming to me, the way the story unfolded in my head. Globally, geopolitically, it feels like we're going through some terribly dark moment in history. When I started the book, that was what was in the air. Trump, Brexit, Bolsonaro–on top of these ongoing assaults from technology on very fundamental, very granular things, like how we interact, how we are with each other. All of that stuff remains under attack from these enormous corporations with seemingly no morals or sense of humanity. That's the world and it’s okay for me — I’m almost 50.
[Laughter]
Someone interviewing me quoted David Sedaris. He said he’d always looked forward to having a long old age. Now, he says, I'm not sure how much more of this I can take.
[Laughter]
But if you’ve got a child and you’re reading the news and you’re seeing Ireland's carbon emissions are going up again, that it’s going to be the worst year yet for emissions globally. . . Or on the technology front, you have this huge spike in teen suicides tied to smartphone use. It's all so relentlessly bad. So much fiction frustrates me by not recognising the issues that we have. I certainly didn't want to write an issues novel, but I feel like, if you're like a teenager growing up now, then you're going to feel a lot of genuine fear about what the future's looking like. When I was a kid, there was a fear of nuclear war, but it felt like a fairytale in some ways. Whereas now, it's endemic, it’s all around you. You’re made part of the problem by virtue of owning a phone, you find yourself contributing to these issues because you’re a 21st-century human, and it’s hard to see any way out, because the society you’re part of is controlled by tech companies who simply don’t care if the planet goes down the tubes.
Was concern over climate change a big part of it going into the novel, or a concern that worked its way in?
It's something I think about a lot. It's remarkable that it's even something that I have to acknowledge thinking about a lot. We should all be thinking about it 24/7. The fact that we’re not just shows what an insane time we’re living through. So I feel like. . . I mean, if you were in Germany in 1941, and you're sitting at your desk writing your novel, and every time you look up you’re watching these trains go by outside — and you know what's on the trains — but then you go back to your fucking novel about relationships or whatever. It’s very, very bad and just frustrating to me. Well — it's interesting to me. It’s interesting to me that we don't seem to be able to recognise the magnitude of that because we're afraid of changing.
Each of us has our own little take on things. You find something you like doing and, hopefully, you'll be able to make enough money from it that you can buy your house, settle down, and buy a few things that reflect your individualism back to you, and so on. That system is finished. It’s just not working and we need to really address it. But it’s like at the heart of our very secular age is this unspoken religiosity. Basically, people are hoping for a miracle. At the root of it, it’s just this faith that something's going to happen, that someone's going to come along or Zuckerberg's going to invent something that will fix it. Because right now we can't even conceive of what would fix it.
There's an asteroid coming towards us and we're being told just don't look at the sky.
[Laughter]
Without wanting to make it about issues, that's just one instance of how we just make our way through the world refusing to look at things, refusing to see things as they are and how that's going to. . . So in the book, there's a metaphor, like two warring images of the past. One is like, we live in this continuous present. That's how we see the world. We live in this time where it seems like news moves so fast, which you could really see with Trump. Trump would do something insane that in days of yore you would just have seen. . .
For six months.
Yeah, right, it would have been a career-ending catastrophe that would be all over the news for a year. Things move on and are forgotten so quickly now that it seems like the past doesn't really exist. You press a button on your history and it's banished. So, that's one idea of it, that it [the past] is not relevant anymore. We're always just being propelled into the future and whatever new sort of iterations of ourselves we hope to find there. The other image is that the past is this invisible toxic gas. It's like a greenhouse gas and everything you do is creating the past, you know? Everything you do has consequences and those consequences are invisibly building and they're poisonous. Some of the things are poisonous, and, if you don't address them, then you’re going to suffocate yourself and every interaction.
Have you ever seen Slacker [Dir. Richard Linklater, 1990]?
The 90’s movie? Madonna's pap smear Slacker?
[Laughter]
Well remembered. There’s a figure in it, this really scary guy, who reappears in Waking Life as the devil. He says: Every single commodity you produce is a piece of your own death!
[Laughter]
He’s got a point! Ireland, as you know, is this very car-oriented culture. People really like their cars. I live in Dublin and the traffic is always fairly terrible. It’s really so much quicker to make your way around by public transport or by bike, but people won't leave their cars. The Dublin City Manager was saying recently, he said it never fails to amaze me, what it would take — no matter what changes they introduce. They'll do things like close a road and people will just sit in traffic for an extra 20 minutes.
The car is this symbol of the false promise of capitalism. I always feel like such a teenager talking about capitalism, so forgive me, but the car, it offers this vision of autonomy, independence, freedom but it’s binding us into this dysfunctional system that's literally pumping poison gas into the air around the clock.
So, in the book, Dickie, the dad of the family, he’s got a car business. He never wanted to do any of this stuff, but the way things have fallen he finds himself embedded in what's pretty much one of the central drivers of the whole capitalist machine, no pun intended. He’s compromised, but what can he do? He can bring in electric cars, but that's not really going to fix it. He starts cycling to work. There’s no way out without making some radical change, just like he as a person and the situation he's got himself into. He really needs to do something really, really big, and he's not able to do it.
To briefly go back to this idea of two competing images of the past. One being this ahistorical, eternal present; the other being, we live in a world where not only do our actions have consequences, but these consequences build cumulatively. Do you think we live in version two, but we’re being sold version one?
I feel like these days the past exists basically as YouTube. That is, we have this fantasy that we’ve got total control of the past and can summon it at will. It's just this amusing, somewhat blocky, poor resolution stuff that happens on YouTube.
The promise of capitalism is that, and again–with the caveat that I feel a bit embarrassed speaking about ‘capitalism’–is that it's endlessly promising us that things are going to get better. So we’re always looking forward, with the belief that if we do as we’re told, the future’s going to obliterate any memory of whatever happened in the past. That’s our reward, that we’ll be delivered from the past, the past will cease to matter.
And it makes sense, on one level, because, you know, people have hard lives. When I talk to people about where they've come from and things that have happened to them and they open up, and the stories I hear are really astonishing. It's astonishing that people can function, get through their day. And it’s not surprising that someone who’s been traumatised should just want to escape.
And that’s Dickie, he’s someone who something has happened to, and now he’s really invested in the fantasy that if he just does the right things, becomes the person that people expect him to be – it'll work. He’ll be transformed. He’s acting his way through life, essentially, adopting this sort of generic persona of what a good person is like. All of the characters are doing that. They're all denying their past, themselves, hoping for some sort of exit, like literally from the town, or into an affair.
They’re looking for a miracle, a magical way out.
Well, they're achievable miracles, right? Or it seems achievable, that we can press a button and make the past disappear. But in fact. . . well, while I was writing the book, during Covid, I listened to this Heidegger lecture series by this guy, Herbert Dreyfus, who taught at Berkeley and was one of the big authorities. He was also very interested in AI, incidentally, which he was very critical of.
Anyway, Heidegger has this idea of thrownness. He’s got this idea that you're thrown into the world. No one chooses to be born in 1975, or 2023, in Dublin, or in Dakar, no one chooses the foundation that their lives are going to be built on, in short. We’re thrown into a particular place and time, and the lives that we have rise out of this random beginning. And every day, we’re thrown into the world all over again, that is, we start from wherever we left off the day before. Like, if last night I crashed my boss’s car, today I wake up and I’ve got to deal with that, one way or the other. Maybe I go to my boss and throw myself on his mercy, maybe I change my identity and flee, but the fact is that my life from that point is predicated on what happened before. Which seems totally obvious, right? But in practice, what we believe we can do, is that we can walk away from our pasts — our childhoods, or even what happened yesterday. Like: I'm not going to think about that. That we can start again with a clean slate. You can't. The past is there, and it's going to continue to resonate beyond your asking to change it, even if, especially if, maybe, your life is all about denying it.
So, Heidegger’s thing is that the future is driven by the past, that the projections we make are driven by the place where we started and the experiences that we’ve had. But you can choose what you take from your past. If you've had a terrible childhood, you can say to yourself as an adult, I'm from a poor background and I'm never going be anything because my father was such a fucking awful person, and I've got this weighing down on me and his words echo in my head and I’m going to try and take solace in whatever it might be. Equally, you can say, My past is such a nightmare, and my father was such a cruel and overbearing person, and I am going to show him that I can make something of myself. Heidegger’s really into time and thinks humans are remarkable because, all of the time, you’re living in the present and you’re projecting into the future, but you’re always informed by the past. We’re inter-relating those three things whether we acknowledge it or not.
You can choose what you take from your past and how you are going to use that for your future. So there’s your existential freedom, right? If you can find a way to make the past work for you, then it doesn't have to be this weight that's crushing you. The way you change the future is to change the past, not by falsifying it but by accepting it and using it in a way that will help you. It can be something that you can use you. . . well, you see where I'm going?
I do. Dickie’s narratives are at odds with one another. He's trying to make a shape for his life that he can live with. His struggle to do that is heartbreaking. You reminded me of one of my favourite moments in the novel, where Dickie accompanies Cass up to visit Trinity. He’s overwhelmed by how much the city has changed since he was there, particularly how less conservative everything appears to him. It’s this wonderful moment where a character’s recognition of a changing Ireland is dramatised.
It made me think that all of your books to date have been about a changing Ireland. An Evening of Long Goodbyes is this parody of a big house novel and an older, aristocratic Ireland, which ends with this man walking out into a new, materialistic Ireland; Skippy Dies is about how we were transformed by money during the Celtic Tiger, and yet still failed, as a society, to reckon with the malign influence of the Catholic Church; The Mark and The Void was about how we became this placeless, neoliberal haven for banks and corporations. You seem to have an innate interest in how Ireland is changing and your novels usually reflect that. There’s a lot of pathos in how your characters respond, or fail to respond, to these changes.
I like writing about the present. It's what interests me on a really fundamental level. The present is where I live, after all. And Ireland is such a tiny country. So many different forces converge in Ireland, for various reasons — historical, economic, religious and whatever else. There are so many kinds of different Irelands and different paths that we're still trying to make our way out of or into. I like sitting down to write a book not knowing how it's going to turn out, and when you write about the present, you don't know how things are going to roll. Maybe the Celtic Tiger could have been a huge blessing in the end, and Skippy Dies could have been some old man rant.
[Laughter]
Change happens so quickly now, and, in Ireland, for whatever reason, it feels like it's a very open country, so these changes are taken up very quickly without a huge amount of forethought. It's almost like a little lab for other countries to try things out. I feel we throw ourselves blindly into these changes that are offered to us and the consequences can be good and bad. The Celtic Tiger — obviously a massive amount of pain and suffering came out of that.
But, equally — to come back to my son — he has no conception of how boring Ireland was in the 1980s. Being dragged to church all the time. It was so dull, so monotonous. And so growing up everybody I knew was just thinking, how can I get out of this place? People don’t have that same sense of claustrophobia now. Which is to say there's been a lot of change for the better.
Still Dickie’s sense of what life is like if you’re young in Ireland now is pretty distorted. He's got this fantasy that it's just like this one big swinging party. It's not. It's still difficult, to be gay, for instance. And it’s got new difficulties that he's not aware of because he's established, he's got a house, all these benefits he doesn’t see. It’s so much harder to find stability now, if you’re young. I wanted it to be clear that he's got this somewhat rose-tinted view of things; but, at the same time, I wanted there to be a sense that Cass and PJ could do something new and amazing. Cass has written a poem, and PJ’s got this interest in science. New generations come along, they see things differently and there are new possibilities. If we give them a chance, they might do something amazing. But the question is, are we going to give them that chance? People think that they’re doing the best for their children, everybody tells themselves that they're doing the things they do for love, but you look around you and the world doesn't seem to reflect that.
The Bee Sting reminded me a lot of Ulysses. Imelda’s chapter is certainly going to invite comparisons to Molly’s soliloquy. It’s long and unencumbered by punctuation. Thematically, also. Imelda and Cass’s relationship echo Molly and Milly’s. A mother watching her daughter attract male attention and is a little rueful of the opportunities her daughter is getting that she never had. Even Dickie reminded me of Bloom. A man, for one reason or another, who can’t go home. Bloom wanders the streets; Dickie is in his shed. There’s also parallels there of Blazes Boylan and Big Mike.
Wow, that's really interesting. I hadn't considered that at all. I find the Milly stuff in Ulysses really interesting because it's so low in the mix. But it's so powerful, with both of the parents. It's a huge thing — she [Milly] is gone. Something has happened, maybe, between Bloom and Milly, that’s never fully explored. And Milly’s relationship with Molly — I love that she [Molly] is jealous. That's really powerful. And it's so interesting that for such a garrulous book, they don’t really talk about her.
With Imelda, I really wasn’t trying to emulate Molly’s soliloquy. I wanted it to be clear that she was coming from a different world to the rest of the family. Obviously, you see that with her upbringing, but also with the way she thinks. I wanted her to think in this very unstructured way. Dickie's very educated and he's able to parse his thoughts very carefully and elegantly.
Which you see formally in the novel.
Right. And Imelda doesn’t have that at all. She’s just seeing the world coming up, hitting her. That's why she feels so vulnerable. Dickie, because of who he is, and his background and education — he’s got an approach to things that she doesn't have. He has this basic sense of his status and agency, of his having a place in the world. Imelda doesn't have that. She doesn’t feel that the world is something that she can step back from and make sense of. She feels much more like she's thrown about by things.
There’s a bit in the first section where the substitute teacher comes in and she's telling the girls about ‘Lady poets’, and how writing poetry — it’s like a mountaineer scaling a mountain. It’s a way for you to engage with reality, to dig into reality and find some purchase on it so hopefully you won’t end up sliding down the mountain. Imelda is someone who's never learnt to read a poem and she's just sliding. Nothing Dickie can give her is really enough to stop that. He can give her things, but he can't really give her the love that — aw, I don’t know. Is that fair? I think he does love her, but I don't think he can really, as it stands — because he's not truthful with her — they can't go forward into the future together. One of the first weddings I ever went to — my friend from school — he said, in his speech, my wife makes me look forward to the future. I still think about it, like 17, 18 years later. It's such a beautiful thing to say, you know? To actually feel like you look forward to the future. That's what love can do. And that’s a real miracle, these days.
Paul Murray's The Bee Sting is published by Hamish Hamilton.