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656 pages, Hardcover
First published June 8, 2023
On the way home Elaine told Cass she was going to post her poem on her Instagram. She had discovered that there was a new generation of lady poets who posted their poems online and got millions of views. They wrote about real-life issues, like racism and homophobia, and were friends with singers, influencers and other celebrities. You could actually become seriously famous from poetry, Elaine noted.
More Nazis rise up out of the floor to block the way; their withered hands reach and spread till they fill the screen, like bare tree branches. Then a curtain of blood falls to cover everything.
Nothing to stop the boy as he came towards her
It seemed the crowd parted to let him through Heads turned to follow him Even in the gammy light of Pap’s his eyes were clear blue like mountain pools and when she looked into them everything around seemed to dim to nothing like it had turned to steam
What’s a girl like you doing in this kip he said
That life is behind you. The story is over, the debt is paid, the darkness of those years dispelled. And the person that remains, the man here in the woods – is you.
In the next town over, a man had killed his family. He’d nailed the doors shut so they couldn’t get out; the neighbours heard them running through the rooms, screaming for mercy. When he had finished he turned the gun on himself.--------------------------------------
Everyone was talking about it – about what kind of man could do such a thing, about the secrets he must have had. Rumours swirled about affairs, addiction, hidden files on his computer.
Elaine just said she was surprised it didn’t happen more often.
For months now she has been having the same dream Of a flood that sweeps through the house Carries off clothes from the wardrobes Toys from the cupboards Food from the table In the dream she is trying to stop it She is wading around, pulling things out of the water But there’s too much to hold in her arms and it overcomes her The current grows stronger Pulls away the appliances the kitchen island tiles from the floor paint from the at the edge of the water watching her go Staring down as she’s swept past In their eyes she is old Her youth is gone too It has all been washed away by the waterThe Barnes family is having their problems. It is 2014 in small-town Ireland. We follow Dickie, Imelda, his wife, PJ, their son, and Cass, a high school senior, through a range of travails. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina opens with, Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Guess which category the Barnes family fits into.
You couldn’t protect the people you loved – that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering. He said I love you to his wife and it felt like a curse, an invitation to Fate to swerve a fuel truck head-on into her, to send a stray spark shooting from the fireplace to her dressing gown. He saw her screaming, her poor terrified face beneath his, as she writhed in flames on the living-room carpet. And the child too! Though she hadn’t yet been born, she was there too. All night he listened to her scream in his head – he couldn’t sleep from it, he just lay there and sobbed, because he knew he couldn’t protect her, couldn’t protect her enough…On top of which, secrets abound. They are all trying to find a way out, except for PJ, who is mostly interested in seeing things returned to the way they were before the dealership miseries began, and radiated outward. Murray shows how dysfunction and damage can carry forward from one generation to the next, the brutality of Imelda’s family, the emotional absence of Dickie’s. But all has not been destroyed.
When Dad was fun everything was fun. Not just holidays, not just Christmas. Going to the supermarket! Cutting the grass! At bedtime they had pyjama races, they read Lord of the Rings cover to cover, they put a torch under their chins and told each other ghost stories…Family connection is important, mostly in the desire of most to sever it. Dickie was desperate as a young man to get away, get an education, do something other than sell cars for the rest of his life. Imelda came from a toxic family (not all of them) and also struggles with her connection to the family she is in, for current-day part of the story. Cass wants out, ASAP. Tethers are cut, but some are also sewn. The tension between these struggles is fuel for the story.
Some people might say that the key problem is with coming back from the dead specifically. Because obviously death is a pretty serious step with all kinds of long-term effects that you’re not going to just shake off. But lately you’ve noticed it with other things too, that even though they never actually died, when they came back from where they’d gone they were still completely changed.Imelda keeps looking for the ghost of Frank to show up at her wedding to Dickie. Dickie is definitely not the same after returning from Dublin. Same for Cass and PJ. Other characters, a maid, a mechanic, a patriarch, return as well, with mixed results.
…is it worth taking the risk? Sometimes? If you could still sort of see the person they were and you thought maybe there was still enough time, if you knew what to do or say?Bees get a bit of attention, if a bit less than expected. The bee sting of the title is inflicted on Imelda, on her way to her wedding to Dickie. Her face was in no condition to be seen, so every wedding picture of her is through her veil. There is another passage about the mating habits of bees. It does not end well for the males.
…the pesticide the farmers use on plants contains a neuro-toxin that destroys their memory so they forget their way home, can’t make it back to the hive where they live, and that’s why they’re dying out. When they looked in the hives they found them not full of dead bees, but mysteriously empty. Maybe that’s what happened to Cass, you think. Maybe air pollution in the city has damaged her brain and now she’s forgotten her home. Though really you know it started way before she came here.The impact of stinging on the stinger is also considered.
I wrote Imelda’s section, and I knew she was on her way to this dinner… I wrote that first line like she, well, she needs to use the bathroom really urgently. And I put commas in and a full stop. And it did not feel right at all. The only way to write it was without the punctuation, and I wanted it to feel like you’re in her head. She doesn’t parse things in the same educated way that Dickie or indeed the kids would do. She just thinks in this much more immediate, intensive way. When you go from the kids’ sections into Imelda’s section, I wanted it to feel like, woah, there’s a change in gear here. Like there’s something’s going on that hasn’t been apparent up until now. At this moment in her life, but maybe at every point in her life, everything feels extremely precarious. She’s on this knife edge, all the time. She always feels like everything’s going to collapse, the floor is going to disappear from under her and she’s going to just tumble down into the past with her abusive dad and the poverty and the grimness and stuff. - from the. Hindustani Times interviewIt would not be a Paul Murray novel if you did not come away from the reading without a few more laugh lines in your face. He takes the most liberty with this in the teens’ sections, the most reminiscent of the grand, rude humor of Skippy Dies to be found here. For example
Nature in her eyes was almost as bad as sports. The way it kept growing? The way things, like crops or whatever, would die and then next year they came back? Did no one else get how creepy that was?You get the idea. Love this stuff.
or
Behind him, another boy, not as tall but slightly droopier, had started kissing Elaine. It was distracting; it seemed like she could hear it even over the metal, a squelching noise like walking on frogspawn.
or
It feels weird reading a prayer off his phone, where he has looked at so many unreligious things. He hopes the Virgin Mary knows it’s meant for her, that he’s not praying to e.g. Candy Crush or Pornhub.
Ireland is a place where people are very good at talking. People are so funny and have such brilliant stories, and it’s a way to disguise what you’re actually feeling. The reason, I think, is because this is a place where very terrible things have happened and the way we deal with them is by not addressing them. So I feel like the ghosts are alive and they’re active. The past is affecting what you’re doing in a very real way. And if you don’t address the issues, then the darkness just grows, and the damage gets passed down from one generation to the next, like in the book. – from the Guardian interview
We need to take off our masks …. And that's hard, after a lifetime of hiding away, it's existentially hard, take it from me. But once you do it, the world is transformed. Once you take off your mask, it's like all the other masks become transparent, and you can see that beneath our individual quirks and weirdnesses, we're he same. We are the same in being different, in feeling bad about being different. Or to put it another way, we are all different expressions of the same vulnerability and need. That's what binds us together. And once we recognize it, once we see ourselves as a community of difference, the differences themselves no longer define us. That's when we can start to work together and things can change.
"We need to take off our masks. And that's hard, after a lifetime of hiding away, it's existentially hard, take it from me. But once you do it, the world is transformed. Once you take off your mask, it's like all the other masks become transparent, and you can see that beneath our individual quirks and weirdnesses, we're the same. We are the same in being different, in feeling bad about being different."