Bee Sting

One of my favorite things in the world is a well written, big fat book with a great story that I can't put down.

A car dealer in rural Ireland runs up against the 2007-2008 recession, his business is in trouble, and his and his family's lives start to implode. Dickie, his wife Imelda, and his children Cass and P.J. are forced to confront the lies they have been telling themselves and each other. Each of their lives changes dramatically, and merge in a surprising twist at the end that leaves the reader hanging a bit.

The integration of the stories of each of the characters is really well done. The chapters shift between the characters' points of view while successfully carrying the plot throughout the book. Each character's voice is distinct from the others and each personality is well realized.

This is about what happens when people, especially within a family context, choose not to communicate with each other, and how destructive that can be. The book is also pretty funny.

I did not finish this book.

When I started it, I thought this is one of the best books I have read in a long time.

Then I came to the part where I would have to read hundreds of pages without punctuation. At first, I got used to it, and read it all the way to Frank's funeral. There I started skipping pages, browsing forward to see if this ends soon, so that I can get back to enjoying the book again. But I realized that even if a read past this section, I will be worried that something like this will happen later on in the book...

There are more good books in the world than I can read through in a lifetime. I might as well pick another one. One that I would enjoy reading.

Three stars anyway. This is a good book, if the trickery with punctuation is something you can live with, then this is an excellent read.

For me, I just could not enjoy it.

Skippy Dies was one of the best books I'd ever read when I first came across it. I was in many ways primed for it; Murray had clearly read Pynchon and David Foster Wallace but he fused the ambivalent system-building and 50-odd characters with a very deeply felt humanism. It was sentimental slop for crybabys, basically, I loved it and I can still quote quite a few lines from it from memory. A funny sidebar is that Murray obviously read a Kevin Myers article about how the independent Irish state, out of its commiments to anti-imperialist politics, silenced, erased and ignored the young men who fought and died for the British Empire at the Somme and reproduces it uncritically; Skippy Dies is set in Blackrock College and this is one of the oversights that come with this terrain.

I was put off his follow-up, The Mark and the Void, because I heard him say in the press that his intention was to humanise bankers and other people who work in the financial sector; after the 2008 recession I had no interest in seeing these people represented as human beings because that is exactly what they are not.

I picked this up on an impulse and burned through the first two sections, everything that made Skippy Dies was here, the sadness, the search for meaning, the loneliness, the humour, even if a handful of the similes were slack or redundant.

Whenever a good novel switches point of view from a character I've come to enjoy I always feel a slight inward resistance. I felt it the first time this happened here but I realised very quickly I was in good hands and was as sold on this new point of view as I was on the first. When I shifted onto someone else for the second time I was ready to go wherever I was being taken, but it didn't come off.

What was notable about this sudden collapse in credibility was that it set in when Murray, for the first time in his career, is trying his hand at conventional Irish naturalism; we see a character growing up in a rural homestead ridden with angst, anger, repression, Catholicism and a certain residual Pagan mysticism. It just does not work and the credibility problem is exacerbated further by a completely unconvincing home invasion.

This is all intended to give us an insight into the childhood of a character who up until that point has been a The Wife, in the worst sense. All that she has been doing is complaining, screaming at other characters, worrying about social appearances, buying shoes. This flashback was supposed to give us the reason why this woman is like this, but ultimately it's not breaking out of women be shopping territory. I know this is not science-fiction, families and people like this exist, husbands hit a roadblock in their life and offload responsibility for the household to their wives who are ground to powder under the pressure but given Murray's capacity to show processes like this unfolding far more convincingly elsewhere it just does not work in the context of what this novel is trying to be, i.e. a Franzen-y multi-generational emotional history of a family with Wodehouseian characteristics.

I would be inclined to say that what's happening here is that Murray is at his best representing teenagers or manchildren from Dublin experiencing ennui, rather than a milieu dominated by adults and a world of real-life consequences or suffering outside of the M50, but I think this is just a matter of execution. The kind of book that makes me wish some authors were in the habit of re-drafting something they've already put out, decide 'that fat and ugly mother who ruins everyone's attachment style is a bit pat, let's change that up'.