‘The Bee Sting’ Review: When Did It All Go Wrong?

In the middle of his sprawling new novel, “The Bee Sting,” Paul Murray relates the sad tale of Ireland’s native red squirrel. A little over a century ago, the Duke of Buckingham sent a wicker hamper containing a dozen North American gray squirrels to a newly married couple on an Irish country estate. When the hamper was ceremoniously opened on the lawn, the squirrels dashed into the forest; soon, “like some fable of colonialism,” they were multiplying throughout the island. Gray squirrels carry but are immune to a squirrelpox virus that gives red squirrels lesions around their mouths and makes them unable to eat. So just like that, because of a single wedding present an entire species was pushed to the brink of extinction.

The Barneses are the native Irish clan beset by catastrophe in Mr. Murray’s family saga. By outward appearances, they’re the envy of their small, unnamed city. Dickie, the paterfamilias, runs the local car dealership inherited from his father and has stayed on in his childhood house, with its huge woodland property in the back yard. His wife, Imelda, is a famous beauty who wields a credit card like a martial-arts black belt. Their children, Cass and PJ, have grown up with every material advantage. It’s the perfect domestic Icarus flight to bring crashing down to earth.

And it’s the Crash that does it, Ireland’s economic depression following the 2008 banking crisis, which edges Dickie’s dealership toward insolvency and forces Imelda into the humiliating ritual of selling her designer clothing on eBay. The financial collapse strikes the family members as a kind of breach of contract—“a slow, methodical undoing of everything he ever thought was true,” as PJ thinks of it—and makes them darkly suspicious of behavior they had previously taken for granted. Imelda rails against some kind of longstanding personality flaw that leads Dickie to passively accept his ruin. Cass, whose promised enrollment at Trinity College is now at risk, begins to wonder what else her parents are hiding. Why aren’t there any wedding photos among the family pictures adorning the mantle? And what did that drunken old codger at the pub mean when he said that Imelda had once been engaged to Dickie’s dead younger brother, Frank?

As “The Bee Sting” continues the Barneses’ stories it starts to unwind past events, moving backward through obscured causes and effects like a video of toppling dominoes played in reverse. “You look back at the past and you can’t tell where exactly you went wrong,” thinks Dickie. “Was it a single misstep?” The question that haunts this book is why things happen the way that they do. Is there some original sin in the background of every family that presages the fall to come, a decisive moment when the squirrels are released and the future is decided? A different book might pursue the mystery by investigating fate or chance, but “The Bee Sting” is an Irish novel, full of superstitions and prophecies (Imelda’s aunt Rose reads tea leaves and has “flashes” of clairvoyance), so the question is better phrased: Are there such things as curses?

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To note that this novel is Irish is to call up another, more flattering generalization: stylistically it’s outstanding, defined by supple, engaging prose and a preternatural sense for storytelling. Even keeping in mind the marvels of 20th-century Irish literature, the quality of the writing still emerging from this small island is a source of wonder. Four Irish authors, including Mr. Murray, have just been named on the longlist of the Booker Prize, which is open to English-language fiction from anywhere in the world. The country’s roll call of talent—Anne Enright, Kevin Barry, Sara Baume, Donal Ryan, Eimear McBride, John Banville, Claire-Louis Bennett, Sebastian Barry, Claire Keegan, Colm Tóibín, Emma Donoghue and Bernard MacLaverty, to provide an incomplete list—is also notably diverse, encompassing updates to a glorious literary tradition as well as a thriving avant-garde.

Mr. Murray’s place in all this appears to be evolving. Until “The Bee Sting” it would have made sense to call him Ireland’s best comic novelist, based on his hilarious and macabre boarding-school romp “Skippy Dies” (2010) and to a lesser extent “The Mark and the Void” (2015), a sharp banking satire undermined a little by narrative gimmicks. But the new novel, while frequently funny, has more serious intentions. Mr. Murray has always been able to dazzle and entertain, but he has never before developed characters with this much depth or capacity for tragedy.

So richly detailed is “The Bee Sting” that it reads like four books woven into one, as each member of the Barnes family is allotted a lengthy section rendered in free indirect discourse. Cass, in her final year of high school, is mostly preoccupied with staying in the good graces of her popular and controlling best friend, Elaine, and Mr. Murray nicely meshes together the elements of disillusion, peer pressure and sexual awakening that mark her troubled maturation. PJ, who is younger and more cerebral, is mostly left to his own devices and his section takes the form of a thriller: Menaced by a bully, he considers running away to Dublin to stay with a friend he met online and who, it’s obvious to the reader, is a predatory adult masquerading as a child.

The novel plunges fully into the past when it occupies the mind of Imelda. Mr. Murray has borrowed from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in “Ulysses” in imagining this earthy character, whose thoughts are rendered without punctuation (though capital letters still indicate the start of new sentences, so the chapters are not hard to read). Imelda, who has “an accent that could strip paint,” comes from poverty and violence, the only daughter of a tyrannical former boxer, and her courtship with Frank, a Gaelic football star and the golden child of the affluent Barnes family, is her means of escape. When Frank dies in a car crash—he is buried in his wedding suit—Imelda is tossed back into uncertainty until she grabs the life vest offered by an equally dazed and grief-stricken Dickie.

Has Dickie acted manfully, stepping into his brother’s shoes in marriage and the family business, or is his substitution a violation of the natural order? The chapters from his point of view cast back to his university days, and while they ought not to be spoiled here, they introduce more secrets that his seemingly covetable family life is meant to hide. A complex and highly rewarding sense of ambiguity begins to attach to the plot turns as these secrets are threatened with exposure. A terrible feeling of inevitability continues to bear down on the Barneses, promising their dissolution, but it’s also clear that they are complicit in choosing and persisting on their paths and that a transformative act of honesty could change their outcomes.

Through a succession of suspenseful twists and feints, Mr. Murray advances the stories of the characters individually and then collectively, in a bravura final section that draws all four together. It’s only in a final coup de theatre, when coincidences bring about a literal four-way collision, that the drama feels heavy-handed, manipulated rather than organically unfolding.

But by this point, we have spent so much time with the characters that our investment in their lives has been vouchsafed. The nice thing about this novel’s somewhat 19th-century length is that is allows for moments of reality outside the chain of causation that propels everyone forward. Startling flashes of sympathy tear through the curtains of secrecy and self-involvement. Considering the fragility of fatherhood, Dickie thinks: “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.” Later, in a rare access of concern for her younger brother, Cass comes to the same realization: “This must be what it’s like being a parent, constantly worrying your kids will be annihilated the moment you look away. That must be why they’re all so insane.” In the faltering mixture of candor and deception, helplessness and desperate prevention, Mr. Murray creates a heightened but truthful portrait of family love.

And what about that strange absence of wedding photos? The explanation Cass hears is that, as Imelda drove to the church, a bee got trapped behind her veil and stung her below the eye, leaving a welt that her vanity wouldn’t allow to be recorded. Cass, in a teenaged snit, takes the story as evidence of how ridiculous her parents are and a portent for their failures. The real reason, gradually revealed across the course of “The Bee Sting,” turns out to be more complicated, more human and much more awful. Which should they choose: Continue on inside the maze of a consoling lie, or accept the painful consequences—and maybe the freedom—of telling things as they really are?

—Mr. Sacks is the Journal’s fiction critic.