“News gets to you”: an interview with Paul Murray*

*This is an edited version of an interview article which appeared in The Australasian Journal of Irish Studies vol.24, 2024. I thank the editors for permission to reproduce this extract.

In this interview extract, Irish novelist Paul Murray describes the context of production for his most recent novel The Bee Sting. The novel was written during the Covid lockdowns. Murray observes of that time, “I didn't feel like I wanted to be writing an escapist book that would just distract people from all these things. I couldn't do it. News gets to you.”

Instead, the novel satirises the desire for escape itself, then allows the deferred consequences of this desire to arrive tragically. ‘Escapism’ is denied at a narrative level, with an insistence on disaster, rather than allowing a side-stepping of catastrophe at the conclusion. It is denied at a political level also; the cultural trajectory of the times is confronted and the implication for our ecological future anticipated.

The terrible news of the time inflected Murray’s state of mind while writing the novel; news got to him. The tragic mode of The Bee Sting – deployed without relief-giving catharsis – ensures the terrible news gets to the reader too.

Matthew Ryan:

In your novels, you have often written from the perspective of children or young people. The child, as an image in literature, is often associated with potential and the anticipation of the future. But here, particularly in The Bee Sting, there's a tension. It seems, in that novel, the key problem is the impossibility of envisaging a viable future. The novel articulates this through children. Can you talk about that tension between the child as narrator, as image, and as character, and this problem of the future?

Paul Murray:

I remember hearing a story about a novelist.  He'd written a book about climate change and he was describing it to teenagers. But he was astonished at how much further along they were in their understanding of it. He, as an adult, wanted to tell them: ‘Here's a serious issue we need to address.’ But for them, it's part of their psyches: the terror of it and the powerlessness. I think, if you're a young person, it’s just part of who you are in a way that my generation has totally failed to understand. So, they can see my generation and the older generations totally failing to address it. At the COP28 summit, Sultan Al Jabara said that there's no meaningful science relating fossil fuels to climate change; it's a fucking joke. It's an absolute disgrace. Every government in the world should be working on this all the time but they're not.

Everybody acts like they want to create the best lives they can for their children; nothing's more important to them than their children. But that's not true, because the world they're handing down to their children is dying. They are still driving around in their SUVs and flying to Tahiti. I think there's a real disconnect. I guess we can't imagine a world without us. People are bad at medium-term thinking. I remember reading that in relation to smoking. You're not going to step in front of a bus, because that has a very short-term consequence. But people continue to smoke for a long time, because we're very fuzzy about the stuff that happens down the road. Climate change is something like that. It's the future. It is this sort of amorphous, nebulous, kind of thing that we don't seem to be able to relate to our lives right now.

The kids in The Bee Sting are idealistic. Cass is 17 years old, and PJ, her brother, is 12. Cass wants to be a poet, although she's cynical because she is afraid. She doesn't have much confidence, so she's afraid to say she wants to be a poet. And her brother is interested in science and the world, which is quite endearing. But as the book progresses the situation of the family becomes dark. They're not going to be able to become the people they could be because of the choices their parents are making. The future is being shut down. And this is happening as we speak. We're still not addressing climate change in any kind of serious way. It's seen as a technical issue as opposed to an existential issue. I guess it comes down to what I was trying to get at earlier. It's not something that can be addressed by individuals. It's something that we have to work together to fix. But society is not equipped for people working together. We’re motivated by this fantasy of individualism. So, the dad in the book can't really process the future. He starts prepping. His way of dealing with the future is to opt out of society altogether and to build his little fortress where the family can exist in this pure space. It's violent, separated from everything and everyone else. And that's even worse; it's not a solution at all.

Matthew Ryan:

I want to ask, finally, about the relation between satire and tragedy. Your earlier work is very funny. The Bee Sting contains gags, but it’s a little like there are jokes in King Lear. I think The Bee Sting moves away from gags toward a tragic structure in a fairly classical sense. What do you think about that reading? Do you see a shift in your writing, in this novel, to this more tragic mode?

Paul Murray:

Yeah, I guess I would. When I started this book, it was going to be an entirely different project. It was going to be a romantic comedy about a boy and a girl at Trinity College. I had done a lot of preparation for it: plotting, character, and so on. But it wasn't until I started writing that I realized I didn't want to do it. It just didn't engage me. But the girl in the book was Cass. So, I started digging into her backstory. I knew she left this little town and she had issues with alcohol in the past. I knew it could be funny; I had some jokes. But then, I just didn’t want to write it. It was strange. It was a kind of physical thing. I could feel it in my body, as I was sitting there. I just wasn't feeling funny.

I started the book at the end of 2017. I would look at the paper every day. It would be full of Brexit, Trump, and Bolsonaro. It felt like this even before Covid, like civilization was crumbling. I didn't feel like I wanted to be writing an escapist book that would just distract people from all these things. I couldn't do it. News gets to you. It feels like people are evil when you look at Trump's America or at climate change. That's a bad feeling to have. Or that people are incurably lonely, and that loneliness is manifesting in destructive ways. It’s the feeling that the tech bros have given us this world that is doomed because it has stopped us from even being able to speak to each other in any meaningful way. That's what it felt like. It felt like a lonely place.  So, when I changed direction, I started writing that.

It was just going to be about Cass in the first part of the book. She is narrating her life in a small town and it's a coming-of-age story. She's obsessed with the best friend, and they’re in school and doing school things. But then, as the story widened, I realized there was a bigger story there about the family’s past and their traumas. And all the things that I was concerned about in my daily life - like the far right or climate change or the pornification of reality - those things began to find their way into this book. It was exciting to be able to write about those things. Cass narrates the first part and PJ the second. There was some scope for comedy in there. But when I got to the mother’s section – her name is Imelda – she has a very traumatic past which is not funny at all. It did feel like a change in the way I wrote.

I had a tutor called Ali Smith - an amazing writer. She would use this concept of the ‘safe trap’. The safe trap is when you don't know what you're doing and, to comfort yourself, you reach for the thing that you're good at. So, if you're good at writing romantic moments then you'll reach for those. I'm good at comedy, so I might find myself reaching for comedy. That's not how I used comedy in the previous books, I don't think. But it's always something that I'm aware of.  So, with the Imelda section I did think, ‘Well, this isn't funny; there's no jokes in this bit. Should I put some in?’ But you've really got to go with your gut. It sounds like bullshit, I know, but when you're writing you really do feel physically if things are right or wrong. So, if you're writing and it's not working, you feel dissatisfied in this very embodied way. By the same token, if you are writing something that's moving, you can just feel it's working. I felt like it was the right thing to do. So, it did feel like a shift. But it felt that, for the times, this was the right kind of book.