Paul Murray: ‘I just dumped all my sadness into the book’
The Irish novelist on his wife’s response to his darkly comic new book, the ghosts that haunt his country, his love of Thomas Pynchon and distrust of Dickens
Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist
Killian FoxSaturday 27 May 2023
Paul Murray was born in 1975 and raised in south Dublin. He finished his first novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, while doing a creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia. He followed this with the blackly comic Skippy Dies, longlisted for the Booker prize in 2010, and The Mark and the Void five years later. His latest novel, The Bee Sting, tracks the unravelling of a family in Ireland’s Midlands – Neel Mukherjee has described it as “generous, expansive and glorious as a cathedral”. It is also darkly hilarious. Murray spoke to me from Dublin, where he lives with his wife and son.
Reading The Bee Sting, I was impressed by your knowledge of Midlands car dealerships, gay clubs, survivalists and the interior life of teenage girls, among many other things. Which was hardest to come by?
They were all difficult in their own ways. One thing I’ve got better at as I get older is just listening to people. People have crazy lives. The stuff that happens to – quote-unquote – ordinary folks is very operatic. So I gathered stories as I went along. I’ve got a couple of friends who have connections to car dealerships – it’s a big deal to own a car dealership in the Midlands. In the 90s, when I was in college, gay clubs were starting up. Some of my gay friends were still in the closet, so for them that was a very powerful experience. It was really exciting, the idea that you could be transformed as a person.
When you wrote Skippy Dies, you were a lot closer in age to the teenagers you were writing about. Did it feel like a much bigger leap this time?
Yeah, definitely. When I wrote Skippy Dies, the culture and the language was still something I could understand. Whereas it’s very different being a teenager now, though in some ways it’s the same – the differences obscure the similarities. Teenage life now is much more issue-driven. As a teenager, I was quite apolitical and unaware of the wider world around me, but now you’re constantly connected to everybody else in the western world.
This feels like a very haunted book, and the ghosts take many forms – not just the dead returning but also the living feeling like ghosts in their own lives.
It’s a generalisation, obviously, but I feel like 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.
You wrote a scathing article on the metaverse for New York Magazine a couple of months ago. What’s your take on AI? Do you think it will affect your livelihood, or does being a novelist insulate you from that concern?
I feel a lot of dread about it. I feel like there’s this assault on meaning, on the basics of what it takes to live a happy life. I think that novelists are insulated, insofar as it’s harder for an AI to produce a literary novel. But this is happening in tandem with, say, libraries closing, or the phone’s assault on attention spans. It’s just one element of this drive to disconnection, to isolate us and make us feel like being cocooned in this hall of mirrors is a better way to be.
Do you feel part of a scene of Irish writers?
There are loads of writers around, but it’s not social insofar as everybody hangs out together all the time. Dublin is a small city, so it’s certainly harder to think that you’re of any importance. If you’re in New York and you’re hanging out with Colson Whitehead and Patti Smith, maybe you’d get some pretensions. But as it is, we’re all fairly sane.
What really good things have you read recently?
Mark O’Connell’s new book, A Thread of Violence [in which O’Connell tracks down the notorious Irish murderer Malcolm Macarthur], is pretty phenomenal. It’s very dark, necessarily, but I found it very rich. Macarthur seems as though he’s being generous and open, but there’s also this manipulative side of him. It’s like a chess game between the two of them, which I found really compelling. Claire Kilroy’s new book, Soldier Sailor, is about a woman in the early months of motherhood when everything has been turned upside down. It’s very, very funny. She’s got this wildly unhelpful husband – one of the great husbands in literature, I think. And I reread Gravity’s Rainbow. It turns 50 this year, so I wanted to go back and have a look at it.
You were a big Thomas Pynchon fan in your 20s. How did it hold up?
It’s just so beautiful, and so bleak and sad. There’s no love in the book. I don’t think the guy was in a good place when he wrote it. I couldn’t have written that book in a million years, but I’m sort of glad I couldn’t.
The Bee Sting is extremely dark in places. People might say the same about you.
My wife, when she read it, said: “What have you done?” But then she started laughing. 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.
Which classic novel are you ashamed not to have read?
There are so many. I feel like one of my many flaws is denouncing writers I haven’t read. Like, I haven’t read much Dickens, and I’ve got a strong position of distrust of Dickens, but I don’t trust my distrust. I feel like, if you were to prod at my distrust of Dickens, you’d find there was no real justification for it.
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