The perfect holiday read: The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray, reviewed

Hello, summer! This is it. If you have been waiting for your big holiday read, finally here it is: an immersive, brilliantly structured, beautifully written mega-tome that is as laugh-out-loud funny as it is deeply disturbing. It is never a good idea to begin a review (or indeed to end one) with a round of applause unless you want to sound like a complete pushover or a total patsy, but full credit where it’s due: Paul Murray, the undisputed reigning champion of epic Irish tragicomedy, has done it again.

He did it first with An Evening of Long Goodbyes (2003), which read as if a young, Irish P.G. Wodehouse were frantically rewriting A Confederacy of Dunces. He did it again with Skippy Dies (2010), a novel as long as it was good and almost as good as it was long, and which won a lot of praise and almost a lot of prizes. His The Mark and the Void (2015) was perhaps a little too much, in several senses: a meta-novel about high finance, bursting with so many ideas about literature, art and money that it eventually became a bit of a bore. The Bee Sting is as ambitious as anything that has gone before, but with a focus and shape that grants it great depth as well as breadth. Seriously, all you need is this, your suntan lotion and a few days off work and you’re good to go.

The book tells the story from the various points of view of the Barnes family – father Dickie, mother Imelda, daughter Cass and son PJ – who live in a typical small town in Ireland where everyone knows everyone and everyone knows your business: ‘When you walked down the street people would slow down their cars to see who you were so they could wave at you.’