The Bee Sting
The Bee Sting
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Paul Murray on The Bee Sting
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
The romantic comedy that broke openThe novel Murray actually wrote bears almost no resemblance to the one he started. He had a romantic comedy in hand: a Dublin boy, a Midlands girl named Cass, scenes plotted, dialogue roughed out. The plan collapsed within the first few pages, and it was Cass herself who pulled him elsewhere. The more he traced her backstory and the Midlands town she was escaping, the darker and larger the real book became.
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.
Murray opened the news every day of his drafting period to Brexit, Trump, Bolsonaro, and then Covid. That political atmosphere gave the book its emotional pressure, but Ireland’s own history of collective not-seeing gave it a more specific frame. He points to an abandoned Magdalene Laundry sitting in the Barnes family’s town that nobody ever discusses as an example of the mechanism he was probing.
If you’re an Irish person, you’re very aware of people’s capacity to not see what’s right in front of them, to learn not to see. But I think that’s the same mechanism that’s at work with climate change.
The laundry and the climate crisis share the same psychology in the novel: a community that has trained itself to look away from what it cannot afford to acknowledge.
His son was born during the years he was finding the book’s shape, and what had previously seemed like an intellectual observation about limited perspective became something he felt in his body. Before fatherhood, he had held onto a child’s fantasy of parents as fully formed authority figures. That image of confidence and completeness dissolved, and with it came the structural engine of the novel’s rotating viewpoints.
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.
What might sound like an anxious, driven project was, by his own account, the opposite in practice. The sadness he channelled into the Barnes family’s collapse did not accumulate in him. He describes the five years of writing it as genuinely pleasurable, even as the external world grew more frightening.
I started writing it at the end of 2017, with Trump, Brexit, Bolsonaro and climate change [in the news]. Then Covid came along. But I’ve got to say, when I was writing it, I felt very happy. It felt very organic and the characters felt quite alive for me, and I could just dump all of my sadness into the book and then go off and have a sandwich and feel fine.
How he wrote it
No master plan, just CassMurray composes first drafts by hand, which forces a particular discipline: his handwriting is illegible enough that re-reading requires real concentration, keeping him from slipping into editing before a draft is done. The original manuscript shows the novel beginning with a different character altogether, with Cass not appearing until page seventeen. That late entrance was the moment the book changed shape around her.
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.
He had originally planned an omniscient narrator, the technique he used in Skippy Dies, but abandoned it when he realized that staying entirely inside each character’s limited perspective, with the gaps between those perspectives visible only to the reader, would give the novel more edge.
Imelda’s section, which runs without punctuation, was not a concept Murray arrived at before writing. He was drafting her section in a conventional way when the punctuation simply stopped. The formal choice emerged from her situation rather than being imposed on it.
She’s in a corner and life’s coming at her and she’s not able to parse her thoughts or take the time to break things down and understand them. She’s on the run the whole time. And the lack of punctuation reflects that. [paraphrased from audio]
Writing Imelda also required him to override a reflex that his UEA tutor Ali Smith had named years earlier. Smith warned students about the ‘safe trap’: defaulting to whatever technique you’re fluent in when you feel uncertain. For Murray, that technique is comedy, and he had to decide, section by section, whether deploying it was honest or merely comfortable.
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.
The ending’s ambiguity was not a late concession to difficulty. Murray knew from early on where the final scene would leave the Barnes family. What took years was accepting that any attempt to resolve it would kill it. He tested epilogues set five minutes after the final moment, an hour after, five years after. Each one drained away exactly the tension the ending needed.
I tried out all sorts of epilogues, where things would be clarified. In my mind it was all very clear. But they didn’t work. And so if it is ambiguous, well, then everyone’s reading is as valid as anyone else’s.
The personal thread
Sadness as a resource, not a subjectMurray has said he was not interested in writing autobiography, and yet the emotional register of the novel maps closely onto what he was living through: a young child, a collapsing news cycle, a growing sense that fiction had to earn its keep against the scale of what was happening outside. Faulkner gave him a frame for how the past persists inside a family, and he has cited these two sentences as the closest thing he has to a credo.
If I could only keep two sentences from all of Western literature, they’d be William Faulkner’s: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’
His son’s birth did not just reshape the structure of the novel’s perspectives. It changed what Murray thought he understood about the parent-child relationship at the book’s center. He had carried a child’s picture of his own parents as settled and competent, and becoming a father dissolved that picture into something far more fragile and provisional.
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.
On what the book is wrestling with
The same avoidance, two different scalesClimate anxiety is woven through the novel without ever becoming a thesis statement, and Murray is precise about what he hoped that presence would accomplish. He did not set out to write a climate novel, but he could not honestly set a book in the 2010s and pretend the background did not exist.
I wouldn’t say climate worry was the motivation for my book, but I really do feel like it is the unavoidable background for being alive in the 21st century.
Murray is also candid about his own culpability in the thing the book diagnoses. The novel traces how individuals build impermeable personas that prevent them from seeing clearly or acting collectively. That dynamic runs from the Barnes family dinner table to the political failure to address warming, and Murray finds the personal guilt uncomfortably direct.
What does it mean to ignore it? After all, I’m a Catholic, but I don’t think even that religion could invent something inspiring so much guilt. I mean, every time you turn on a light!
Near the novel’s end, Willie Barnes, who has become a local politician, gives a speech that connects the family’s dysfunction to the wider collective failure. Murray described the connection to Dua Lipa in their Service95 conversation: the first step required of the Barnes family and the first step required on climate are identical.
There’s so much damage done by individualism and the need to kind of create a persona for yourself that’s impermeable to others. It doesn’t work for things like climate change, which are so vast that they really depend on people coming together and just dropping their differences. And it’s also the necessary first step for this family. If they could just sort of be honest with each other — maybe they could find a way forward. [paraphrased from audio]
What he wants us to sit with
Exit the submarineMurray is direct about what he does not want the novel to do. He distinguishes between fiction that comforts and fiction that confronts, and he is unambiguous about which side he is working on. The distinction has practical stakes for him: if readers finish the book feeling pleasantly distracted, he has failed.
I don’t want my work to be something that people just entertain themselves with while we’re falling into the abyss.
Beyond the specific argument about climate and family, Murray has articulated a broader belief in what fiction is for. He frames it as a structural problem: most of us live sealed inside our own perspective, unable to feel what other people’s situations actually cost them. He describes reading as the technology that breaks that seal.
The point of books is to take you out of your little one-man submarine and invite you to feel empathy and to feel [like] we’re not so different. Everyone is coming from the same point of vulnerability and need and experiences the same sense of loneliness and a desire to be part of something bigger.