Booker-nominated and brimming with wit and compassion, Paul Murray's The Bee Sting was one of the stand-out novels of last year. To mark the book's paperback publication and selection as Fiction Book of the Month for May, we present this exclusive piece from Murray in which he recommends his favourite books featuring families.
As I Lay Dying was one of the first ‘grown-up’ novels I read. A kind of a Gothic road trip through the Deep South, it recounts the Bundren family’s journey from the badlands of Mississippi to Jefferson to bury their mother, Addie. They carry the coffin on a horse and cart and encounter many obstacles. It’s one of Faulkner’s shorter and less difficult novels – relatively speaking – and has a sly line in black humour. It ended up being a big influence on my novel The Bee Sting, both tonally and structurally; Faulkner lets his characters take it in turns to tell the story, and the conflicting, even contradictory perspectives that emerge within a single family are brilliantly brought to life here.
Smith’s ingenious historical box of tricks refuses to be categorised, but one way to read it is as the story of two families. Set in Victorian England and flipping back and forth between the 1830s and 1870s, it’s mostly seen through the eyes of Eliza Touchet, who lives with her cousin William Ainsworth. Ainsworth in the 1830s is a famous novelist who outsells his good friend Charles Dickens; by the 1870s, though, he’s fallen very much out of fashion. Eliza and Ainsworth have a romance of sorts, but then he marries his maid, much to the dismay of his three grown-up daughters, who see their inheritance disappearing. Smith sets the conventional stuff of the nineteenth-century novel – marriage, servants, finagling over property – against a much darker, less familiar story. Andrew Bogle is an enslaved man born and raised in a sugar plantation in Jamaica. His family life exists – or not – at the whim of his masters. After the death of his wife, he throws in his lot with a fraudster (or is he?) claiming to be an aristocrat long thought drowned. That well-meaning Eliza is herself the beneficiary of a slave plantation is just one of the multiple ironies abounding in this novel, as Smith gleefully upends the Victorian image of family as inherently virtuous, showing it instead as a mechanism for laundering the profits of Empire while whitewashing its horrors.
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A 600-page book about sheep farming in Iceland may sound like hard going. Sheep farming in Iceland, as Independent People makes very clear, is hard going. But Laxness’s novel, while an unflinching account of the punishment endured by those on the margins, is lifted by its sublime depictions of the natural world. It’s also, crucially, very funny. The novel revolves around Bjartur of Summerhouses, a deeply stubborn man whose determination to be economically self-sufficient on his tiny piece of land brings disaster on himself and his family. His first wife dies in childbirth. His second wife has a series of miscarriages. A missing sheep spells financial ruin, and the search for it in the vast, blasted landscape surrounding the little farm takes on the dimensions of myth. Yet Bjartur and his children keep going through everything, out of nothing more, it seems, than sheer orneriness. There’s too much irony here to call this a testament to the human spirit; yet somehow that makes it all the more moving.
Family is a theme that Enright has mined throughout her fiction – in her Booker-winning The Gathering, as well as her most recent novel The Wren, The Wren. Ingeniously structured and written in Enright’s coruscating prose, in its first part The Green Road follows the four sons and daughters of the Madigan family over 25 years – Hanna as a child, her three siblings in their twenties and as they face into middle age. Each individual life is brilliantly drawn and feels like a novel in itself. Dan, an art dealer in New York, watches as his bacchanalian world is decimated by AIDS; his unsparing brother, Emmet, is an aid worker in Mali, expiating his family’s sins and the world’s. Constance, who has stayed in Clare, has the most ‘normal’ or conventional life, as a well-to-do mammy in Celtic Tiger Ireland; her trip to the supermarket to do the Christmas shopping is one of the great scenes in 21st Century Irish literature. In the second part of the book, the children return to the home place for Christmas dinner with their irascible mother, Rosaleen, who is now losing her mind; everything unravels in Shakespearean style. As in Independent People, the landscape plays a major part here in the form of the not-unIcelandic limestone waste of the Burren – the harsh, beautiful wilderness that the family, no matter how far they go, can ever escape.
Ginzburg’s most celebrated book is part-novel, part-memoir – a group portrait of her family and friends as they sit grousing around the apartment or promenade through the streets of Turin. What begins as a nostalgic, affectionate look back becomes something deeper and sadder as Mussolini comes to power and, one by one, figures we have come to love are picked up and imprisoned. Written with great warmth, this is joy to read – a reminder of the power of humour to beguile us, the better to drop the hammer later on.
Once again, this is a novel that had a huge impact on me in my teens. It’s another ‘mad dad’ story: Allie Fox is an inventor, not a farmer, but like Bjartur in Independent People he’s intent on staking out his own kingdom, come hell or high water. Renouncing the excess and hypocrisy of the United States, he drags his family to the jungle of Honduras where he’s surprised to find that life outside of civilisation is trickier than expected. I read this book… thirty-five years ago? But I still remember it – especially the bravura sequence where they’re carrying a huge block of ice through the rain forest, intending to sell it to tribesmen; its portrait of a prepper avant la lettre I’m sure had an influence on the character of Dickie Barnes, the father in The Bee Sting.
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