No novelist, whatever the main subject of their work, should ignore climate change, argues Paul Murray, the author who has just received one of Britain and Ireland’s top literary prizes for The Bee Sting.
“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. I don’t want to get on a soap box, yet we ought to surely be thinking about it, at some level, most of the time now,” said Nero Gold prize winner Murray, whose tragicomic saga was also shortlisted for last year’s Booker prize. “I’m more concerned that there are some new books that don’t address it at all. 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!”
Murray was talking to the Observer in his first interview since winning the £30,000 prize for Book of the Year at the inaugural awards. The annual competition has filled the gap left by the prestigious former Costa prize, an award that ran for 50 years and was initially known as The Whitbread. Murray’s novel, which topped the fiction category a month ago, was then pitted against the other category winners, including Scottish writer Fern Brady’s non-fiction memoir, Strong Female Character. Also in contention for the overall winner’s prize at last Thursday night’s London ceremony were the debut novel, Close to Home, by Michael Magee, and the children’s story, The Swifts, by Beth Lincoln. The judges, led by Booker winner Bernardine Evaristo, included writers Sara Collins, Sarfraz Manzoor, Anthony Quinn and Dave Rudden.
Concern about climate change is woven through The Bee Sting, which follows two generations of an Irish family as they struggle to stay on track while keeping dangerous personal secrets. It has proved both a popular and critical hit since its publication by Hamish Hamilton last June and this weekend Murray revealed that negotiations to bring his rollercoaster story to the screen are well under way. “A plan to serialise it as a drama for television is in the works,” he said.
The character of Willie, a minor hero of the novel who stays chiefly off stage, is given one stirring political speech about climate change that Murray admits does “slightly break the fourth wall” and which expresses many of his own views. “Willie is being a politician at that point, and is wooing a crowd, but I agree with much of it,” he said.
Murray, 49, was born in Dublin and in his early 20s took up a place on the renowned creative writing course at the University of East Anglia. Recent funding threats to the course, which in the past has produced writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Tracy Chevalier and Ian McEwan, have shocked him, he said. “I’d be very sorry to ever see it go. I can’t understand why this government would want to allow this assault on the university system. I wrote my first novel there and it literally changed my life. I was taught by Ali Smith, who is a genius, but also very generous, as she told her editor about my book.”
Murray believes the looming threat to writers posed by the speedy progress of artificial intelligence should also not be underestimated: “It seems the whole of human communication is being assailed now, perhaps because the leaders of the tech industry have no conception of what it is to be human, or what sincerity is. They can’t own it, so they want to get rid of it.”
Literary fiction, Murray consoles himself, might still be safer than other forms of writing: “It will soon be possible to fake up novels better and better, but what for? When you read you connect with an author, with their intimate experience of life, and that is something you can’t get in any other way.”
Working on The Bee Sting was enjoyable, Murray said, although he admits that its tense denouement – one that has troubled many readers – was “very hard” to write. “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.”
