The Beasting is one of my favorite novels of the past couple of years. When I picked it up, I found myself laughing aloud before I'd even got to the end of the first page, utterly transfixed by the teenaged voices of Cass Barnes and her toxic friend Elaine as they try to make sense of life in a small
town in the Irish Midlands. I was unsurprised. I was already a big fan of author Paul Murray and his previous three novels, and I've come to expect the sharp dialogue, the fully realized human beings on the page, generous humor,
and brutal insights. What I was maybe under prepared for was that some six hundred and fifty pages later, I would be utterly hollowed out by the tragedy of the whole thing, sad and anxious, not just for the characters and their fates, but for life and humanity in general. How is it that such a deeply pessimistic book can be funny and at times even uplifting.
Pasimism quite attractives and I want ever read like a super pessimistic book, or see a super pessmist movie. It sort of resonates with me, but it's not something that I really believe in. I'm not someone who believes that people are that and you know the world is floot like that. That's not the way I see things.
I'm Michael Williams and this is read this to show
about the books we love and the stories behind. Paul Marray's last two novels, The brilliant Skippied Eyes, which was set in a boys' school, and the surreal The Mark and the Void, which was set in the world of banking, were both modern masterpieces of institutional failure, and for his twenty twenty three book, A shortlisted novel, The Beasting the Failing Institution, he turns his comedic eye to is the Family, in alternating chapters from the perspective of four different members.
He follows the Barnes family and it's maybe more than anything else, the story of what happens when people who love each other can't talk to one another, can't share the truth or what they need or what they're going through. He writes kids and teenagers brilliantly well, and the relationship between parents and their children, the everyday failures of empathy and imagination, the cross generational incomprehension and disappointment run through
every page of this book. So to kick things off, I asked Paul about his own parents and about how they might have influenced his work.
My dad passed away a couple of months ago. He was a university professor here in Dublin. So the house is always full of books and that was the big sort of weekly family trip, would go to the local town and go to the laby and get more books. My dad really was uneasy about me writing, Like he was happy enough when I was just doing it as in school as homework, but then when I decided I wanted to do it like full time, he rarely said anything.
But there was a famous occasion when I did a master's in grative writing in Norwich in the UK, when I spent twenty five and it was great because if it was a real sort of like life changing experience. But I remember coming back from that and moving back in with my parents, and I was out of money, you know, and he dragged me to the train station one day and he said, like, you've given it your best shot. It's time to just set it aside and get a real job. So like the next day I
got it might have been that very nice. In fact, it was really weird, sort of serendipity. But I got an email from my tutor in Norwich, Alice Smith. She's a famous novelist, and she told her editor in Penguin about me, and he emailed me like saying, I'd love to see her, love to see your work. And I sent him to work and you know, he bought the book. So that that was a real that was a real moment.
But my dad was always like he was still sending me like job advertisements, you know from the newspapers, saying, you know, things that I would like always do, like I would never be even qualified for. But he'd just be saying, you know, give it a shot, you know, give it a go. So he was like a very gentle, kind of courteous figure like he was. I'd always meet students ex students of his who would talk about like how how generous had been with them, like a very
sort of like unshowy kind of a man. My mum was like sort of my mom's alive and she's she's a real firebrand. And she came from this sort of quite dark part of Ireland and she sort of retains that sense of, you know, the world as being this place of unfathomable darkness. You know, So any kind of situation you would put her in, she would find the you know, the seam of of like of of darkness
in there. So I mean, like that's definitely part of me as a person and also part of the part of the writing too.
I read an old interview with you where you talk about that thing when you become a parent and you realize the way in which everyone's just faking it, that you have to pretend authority because it's not an option to say I don't know, I'm making this up a site go along. And I think each stage of life, whether it's parenting, whether it's being an adult, whether it's old age and mortality, there is an extent to which you're expected to just do it well.
Like I remember coming home when my son was born, coming home with the baby the first ninety seven hospital and the second dary had to prove you're at a car seat so you could take them out of the hospital. If you're at a car seat, so you could put them in a car. And that was the extent of proof that you needed that you were sort of an acceptable parent. And I remember like taking the car seats and putting it down on the kitchen table and thinking
what now, Like what do you do? Because we had no like preparation, like no one tells you anything about how to raise a child, and the degree of improvisation was like very very surprising, you know, and it had even struck me. We didn't know what to do. We
bought a lot of products. And I think that's a really interesting sort of twenty first century thing like it, because I find myself repeating it again and again, like in any sort of given situation, the first thing is like, well, go on Amazon and see like this, like like I'll buy these ten things, and that's how you do it, you know. And with my dad's death, like that was like a rare instance where like, you know, there's there's
nothing available to you. You know, it's just you're just sort of in it and you just have to get through it. But with regard to parenting, like it was really I guess it was when when the kid gets older then and you have to sort of be the authority figure, and especially if you imagine yourself as an artist whose job it is to stand at the margins kind of sneer, the cigarette trooping from your lip, and
just set of being throwing classes and stuff. You have to kind of reconfigure yourself as this person who's wagging their finger all the time and saying now, mind eys, excuse me, now, be careful of this and be careful, like the amount of times in my daily life that I would be saying no, now stop this, no, be careful and just hearing yourself just becoming this voice of like just restriction and limitation and just you know, repression.
And so yeah, with like with my son, like when he complains about school and I have to go like, well, there's a reason, because if you don't go to school, you don't learn things, and you can't get a job, and you won't be able to get a mortgage, and you won't find a you know, a wife, whatever it might be. And I'm still like painting this picture of like the most sort of mainstream version of life that
you can imagine. And the last book I wrote, like, so not the last book, but the book before the Skippy Dies was it was written before my son was born. But I was in my mid thirties and I already had a sense of this generational pretense or generational disguise, because people had gone to school with who again were people you would never trust to do anything like, you know, not even like sort of put up a shelf or
dog sit, you know, whatever it might be. We're now still in positions where like the or being paid a lot of money to manage things, or to like to treat people who are very sick, or they're you know, they're putting positions of power and authority and trust. And that was quite a shock because when you met them they still seemed as unhinged as ever. And you start to realize that there's no point in your life where you sort of actually become You don't change into that
kind of person. It's more than you sort of learned to behave in a certain way in certain situations. But the person you were doesn't fade out, like it's just that they're You just learn not to say the things that you want to say, the things you would say
when you're fifteen. You go like, and even now when I'm doing, like, for instance, an interview, the fifteen year old pride of me'll be like, we'll have something to say, you know I've got a bit of delay now, or my brain will go like, don't say that, you know, that's not appropriate.
I mean one of the things to stick with Skippy diyes for a second. One of the most beautiful things in that book is how deeply lived in an authentic the young voices are in It is that in a fifteen year old voice, Omnipresent does a line in.
Like I think im Peter Pan talking about grown older and he says, it's the strangest thing to happen to a little boy, you know, And it's just this, at some level, we all feel this bewilderment at grown older and and the fact that certain ways of being are no longer available to us, you know. I mean, I don't want to be a teenager by any stretch, but I wouldn't mind being thirty again, Like that would be great.
So I guess, like in one regard, like I'm lucky enough to have like a good year certainly for teenage voices, but also the vulnerabilities are still there, and the desires are still there, and it's more just a sense of realism basically that creeps in that you realize that that that the romantic sort of illusions that I had when I was a teenager, And I guess that's that's what I associate most with being a teenager, is that just the all he's just just very romantic ideas of what
love is like, and what life is like, and how sort of life unfalls like. Those are things that that are gone and I can't get back to, and I don't want to get back to. But at the same time, I wouldn't want any teenager to not to have those, you know, like that, just that that sense that you know that life can be this beautiful opera.
I think one of the things about aging you use the word bewilderment, which I think is absolutely right. But the other thing that that Peter Pan quote conjures up for me is the idea of the inevitability of a sense of fraudulnce when you get older, because you're projecting a capable adult in the world on the one hand, but inside you're still a massive anxieties and doubts and
pretenses and whatever. And it seems to me that in that configuration of getting older, a sense of fraudulence is an inevitable part of it.
I think you realize that you do roles to play with, like parenting in particular. It's like a kind of acting, you know. I mean even a simple a thing is telling someone it's going to be all right, like it's actually it's you know, everything's going to be all right. Like a large part of being an adult is just saying it's under control and it's it's going to be all right. And people are surprisingly trusting when when when
they hear those words. But but I've never felt it's going to be all right, Like I mean, I've never felt like things are going to work out, but it's very important. Yeah, So much of being an adult is just it's like learning to fit in with the sort
of the the setup that you're that you're given. So if you're young, you can define yourself in terms of opposition and saying well, I'm I'm like a rebel and I'm not going to take part in this like society, and then you realize, like as as you get older, that like there's no real outside to it, you know, and you have to find way of making sense of
yourself in it. It's like a negotiation, like what's an acceptable compromise between your your sort of conception of yourself and the way the society allows you to be.
Your deep tenderness for all your characters, I think is one of the things that makes you one of my favorite writers, and across all your books is even the monstrous characters are the ones that are expressly without quality, you have this kind of tenderness towards them, And I'm interested in whether that's an essential thing for you when you're writing.
I think that's so George Saunders. When I'm when I'm teaching a class on character, I always pull up this piece that George Saunder's word for The Guardian, where he talks about exactly that. He talks about how as one goes back ones normal day, you're prey to the same kind of snap decisions and dismissals and short changings of the people that you meet as as anyone else. Like
writers are definitely not sense. But when you're writing sort of an extended piece, particularly like a novel, you're spending so much time with the characters that you know you can't help but sort of dig deeper into the things that are motivating them and the reason they're acting as they are. So like his example is like, you know, sort of a cartoonish version of it, Bob was an asshole. Bob was an asshole because he snapped at the brista.
But then your job as the writer is to kind of like follow that that thread and go, like, why did Bob snap at the brister? Bob snapped the rest of because he was late for work, he was white for because it was his wife's anniversary, and it's like, you know, or whatever it might be. And the more you think about Bob, the more you realize that, like his behavior is coming from like a deep well of experience, and some of it's very bitter and difficult, and that's
just what it is to be a human being. So when you're writing, like that's essentially what you're doing, you're sort of dwelling with these characters over a long period of time, and you realize that by dwelling with them, it's like sharing space with them, We're sharing your time with them.
When we come back, we dig into the Beasting itself and I beg Paul for reassurance that everything's going to be okay, We'll be right back. It's actually really hard talking to Paul Murray about the Beasting because, like anyone who's read it. I'm full of questions, not least about its ending, which is one for the ages, but as a book of such delights and surprises across its epic six hundred and fifty pages, I'm also loath to spoil
it for anyone who's yet to crack the spine. Against a backdrop of existential crises financial, climate, social, the Barnes family are falling to pieces. The father, Dicky, is trying desperately to keep his struggling car dealership afloat, acutely aware of the disappointed judgment of his father, Morris. Dicky's wife, Amelda, is lost in her own memories of compromises past, trying to remember who she is and find a way back
into her own life. Their daughter Cass is in her last year at high school and disillusioned with everything, and their son PJ is twelve, terrified by the ways his family is fracturing before his eyes. Cross generational pressures play out, familial, mythic, sexual, social, and all the while the characters hurtle towards a tragic fate. There should really be too much going on here, but the book's great success lies in the humanity of its characters.
Murray moves between different perspectives, and the voices are each distinct and each indelible.
That is really the name of the game as far as I can see, certainly for me. So even if I've got like sort of like a villainous character, and there aren't many villains in the things I read, but there are some characters I am sort of ill disposed towards. So like in The Beasting, I think Morris is a pretty kind of a bad guy. Daddy's a bad guy.
But nevertheless, it's not interesting to me, or it feels like sort of dishonest to me to just have them there as like as villains sort of throwing their mustaches, because they too have a past. They've come from somewhere, and when I think about like where they've come from. Some Morris, for instance, Dickie's dad, he's come from an impoverished background. He's made something of himself. He's very proud of that, and to the point that he sort of sees himself on top of a you know, a pedestal.
But at the same time, he can't be just sort of reduced to a caricature. And you can tell when you're writing, like if a character is one dimensional, it's not satisfying to write, and it feels kind of cheap. It's very hard to tell when you're writing if anything is working or not. If the characters feel like sort of they've got some depth, then that's where the path is coming from. Like that's where the the next line
of the next chapter is coming from. Whereas if they're sort of, if they're kind of like cardboard villains, then it tends to not generate ideas in the same way.
It's interesting those characters who identify as the kind of potentially more villainous ones in your work are in some ways an embodiment of a particular kind of modernity and a particular kind of a late capitalist, you know, an expression of social wrongs rather than individual failures. That the corruption in both those cases comes from the ways in which society is letting individuals down, you know, in the Mark and the void in Skippy Dies, and certainly in
the Beasting. Part of the story you're telling is one of a society that is failing as much as anything else.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think I'm interested in those points where, just as we were talking earlier about like roles, you have to inhabit. You can achieve great power by adhering to those roles. At the same time, your sense of yourself as a human being would be very would really rest on the moments where you have to step away from those roles, you know, like be it like as a parent, but maybe more so like in terms of work, where you kind of think, if I let
this happen, then very bad things will happen. There'll be very bad consequences for people in positions of vulnerability. So Dickie's got the sense that like the world is bad and people are hostile, and the only thing you can do is like protect yourself from them, you know, and like hide yourself away because otherwise they're going to destroy you. And like that's something I would have felt like when I was you know, like when I was a kid,
like just that sort of vulnerability. And you know, like because I've had like a lucky life like I, you know, you sort of you learn to trust and that people are looked largely good and and you can live in the world and be yourself to a certain degree and that will all be fine. But Dickie's never learned to do that. He's always just had this illusion that the only way to be is other than yourself. Try and fit in as best you can, and if you don't
do that, you know you're you're doomed. So there's no way out for him because like he can't. The moment comes and it said to him explicitly, you have to trust your family and just tell them. You have to tell them what's happened, and just believe that their love for you is going to overpower whatever feelings of shock or horror that they might experience at the things that you've done. And on one level, like he knows that,
he knows it's true. He knows his family loves him and will forgive him anything, and they'll they'll they'll come back, you know, in whatever way that would work. They'll come back to him. But he can't make himself do it. He can't trust them, you know. And that's what it's like to live without. It's a sort of nightmarish version I guess, of what it's like to conceive of yourself as an individual. You know, the ultimate rendition of the
capitalistic individual. You're totally on your own, and that's hell. It it's hell to be on your own.
But the great tragedy of the beasting, it seems to me, is that for the Barnzas, for each of them, the things they desire, the things they need by and large and incompatible, but they're just not seen to one another. They're not able to say, here's the thing that is keeping me awake at night, here's the thing I want for myself. For the Barnzas, the failure, first and foremost, it seems to me, is one of being able to talk to one another.
I think children can pick up on feelings, and the tragedy of the Barnes family is that. So Dickie the father is he's playing a role, but the kids, on some level, like an unconscious level, can tell that he's not fully there. And because he's not fully there, and he's stopped being able to be honest with them just as they're sort of they're hitting their teens. He's a good dad when they're when they're little kids, but as they get older, he's he becomes less and less able
to speak to them. And because obviously the circumstances in the book where he's found himself painted into a corner, basically from it all comes from from the top down. The sense of like of they need to self conceal hits the kids too, so so this atmosphere of like
mutual distrust becomes kind of the prevalent one. And I think it's coming from Dickie because like he's sort of setting the tone, like the marriage, like the two parents, like that their marriage is obviously quite strange, and there's there's like major secrets there and to a certain degree
they've always been pretending. But there's also like there's little moments in the book where you can see that there there's a capacity to love each other, does a capacity to communicate with each other, but they keep on turning away from us because they ultimately they don't trust each other. And because they don't trust each other, then the situations the individuals sort of problems that they have or traps that they've found themselves wandering into, become that much harder to get out of.
I think it's what makes PJ such a moving character throughout the book is the ways in which he is the one who's invested in the family unit. Still he's the one who still hopes that it'll all be okay, hopes that loving each other will be enough to kind of bring them back together when they're fragmented, and it's i mean, some of the biggest moments of comedy in
the book come from his sections, I think. But also just that sense of grief, that sense of something that's lost, is maybe most acute there.
Yeah, I mean characters like they're really all certainly when you meet them at first, they all seem sort of so lost in themselves and so disillusioned with the family, and so determined to just sort of escape and imagine that the only way that they can become themselves or save themselves is to get away from his family, get away from this town, and start again on their own
as individuals. Except for PJ, partly because he's twelve, so he's he can't leave the family really, but he's he's a believer, like he's he's he's a very he's kind of an optimist. He's someone who's very He's got all these facts about nature, and he just is interested in the world and he sort of loves the world in this kind of quite naive way. But he wants the family to and he believes the family can come back together if they just sort of talk to each other.
And he's not wrong. You know, but because he's twelve, the mode of bringing them together is like he does this quite extreme thing, and he tries to run away, and I guess, like PJ is, he's the most vulnerable, you know, And and he's the one who's sort of he's at the sharp end of everything that's that's happening, even though no one really sees him, Like in the family, he's just sort of this kind of like a bit of a pest because he just sort of appears and
says the wrong thing or starts, you know, telling them the fact about nature, and so they're alway kind of like dismissing him and shushing him. And but at the same time, he's the one who's sort of the most exposed to the consequences of being alone, of being abandoned, you know, of being sort of an individual in the world because he doesn't really know how things work, and there are people out there who want to to take advantage of that.
Ultimately, The Basting, for all its moments of great comedy and joy and beauty, still remains from a deeply pessimistic book. Like remains from a book that seems to be about the ways in which we're doomed as a people, as a society. Am I reading it wrong? Making me feel better at Paul.
It's very, very difficult when you take the white view to see a huge amount of hope. Frankly, at the same time when you don't take the white view, when you are just like a person walking around in the world and you're talking to people and among people. Like I said, people don't no one wants the world to go up in flames. Like I feel like we're all to a certain degree in Dickie's position whereby and I think that's maybe the reason why people sort of have
kind of connected with this book. We're all in this position where we've sort of been taught to believe that life is a certain way, which is that we're all alone. And you know, when push comes to show, you have to look out for number one because other people are just going to drag you down. But that's not a sort of viable way of being. So I live. I live in Dublin and Ireland and it's a place where and it's a sense I got from my brief time in Australia too, like that that it's a place where
there's a lot of community. You know there's a sense that that networks for want of better words, are important to people, and people do see the value of having friends and having family and having people around them who they can speak to. And I think if you're aware of that, then you're aware that it's worth preserving, and you're aware that it is valuable and that offers things
that stuff consumers and like can't really replace. But just generally, like in terms of pessimism, like when I was finishing that book, I mean I felt like it ends with it like that's a dark statement, Like there's no denying that. But at the same time, I think that dark statements. I think the ending works because you can see as a reader that like there's an alternative there, like that that this is a family. They aren't all ourselves, like
as individual people, Like they're nice. If you met them in the pub, you'd like you talk to them and you think, like that that was a pleasant conversation. But equally like they have the capacity to relate to each other and love each other and be honest with each other in another life and a better day, even you know, they would be able to dig themselves out of this situation.
Just before I let you go. I did want to ask, after that shaky start with your dad saving you job ads for other jobs and other things you could do. As you became published in each of the books, did he read you and did that change his belief in the venue of being a writer for you?
Like you would think he might have pivoted to things that were more sort of writing adjacent, so he'd say, like, there's a librarian position in Sligo County Library, so you might be able to do that. But with the beast thing, I told him not to read us. I tell my parents don't read it because it's too traumatic. But they did read us, and that was the first time he
really changed his mind. It's been such a blessed book like it's it's it's sort of had such an amazing run that even a parent who's constantly worried that their child is going to end up on the streets, even he could see that it had gone well. And he was really proud of us. And and you know, someone said to me, like, when he was sick, aren't you lucky that he was around to see us like that? He's around to see it. And I hadn't thought of that,
but I was. I was lucky. I am lucky that he was around to see it, because he got such even when he was dying. I remember, like when when he was in hospital, going to see him and he couldn't speak anymore. I told him I was going to London. I've been shortlisted for not one, but two prizes. And I've said this to him and he looked just so sick, and he was so he was so diminished, he was so sad. But I said, oh, yeah, I won't see you till till next week because I've got to go
to London and I've got these these two prizes. And he just had this huge smile. He was just so happy. And that was a moment that I will I'll always remember, you know. And and I think if you're if you're a parent, all you want is for your kids to be okay and to feel like that you know when you go, your kids are gonna be okay and have have like happy lives. So I think for certainly, for a moment, he was able to kind of believe that that was you know, we're going to be all right.
So I was really grateful for that.
All four of Paul Murray's wonderful novels are available at all good bookstores. I'd give a particular plug for the hilarious madness of Skippy Dyes. And if you need to join a group therapy session to discuss the end of the Beasting, email us at read this at Schwartzmedia dot com dot au. Before we go, I wanted to let you know what I've been reading this week, and it made me laugh a lot when I heard that Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein was writing a book about being
serially mistaken for Beauty Myth author Naomi Wolf. Despite being a big fan of Klein's, I have more than once had to do a double take to remember which Naomi is which. Well, it's important to say that Klein's latest book, Doppelganger, which is just one of the Women's Price for Nonfiction, is much more than just to throw away joke. It's an amazing book. It's about identity and contemporary life, about the divide between being a public intellectual and a conspiracy
theory toting grifter. It's a fascinating rate. You can find it and all the others we mentioned at your favorite independent bookstore. That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate and review. It helps a lot. Next week I read this, I speak with a literary legend, the Sri Lankan born Canadian writer and poet Michael Dacci, who's been publishing work for more than fifty years. Read This is produced and edited
by Clara Ames. Mixing and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See you next week.