This book was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, which was won by Peter Lynch’s Prophet Song (see the separate note on that book). The paperback edition of Murray’s text is plastered with intrusive endorsements. Frankly, I strongly dislike this practice, although I do not mind a handful of them. Nevertheless, the book is well worth reading, despite its 643 pages. I could not make sense of the pages 185 to 285, so I just scanned them. When Murray writes about one of the characters, he omits full stops but keeps question and exclamation marks. Also, the beginning of a sentence is still capitalized. At first, I found this irritating, but I got used to it, though I still doubt that it is an effective stylistic device. As things move toward the climax of the book (pages 616 to 643), Murray chooses a format that I think conveys well the sense of accelerated urgency of the course of events.

            You could read the book as a story about the dynamics within a family. And indeed it is about the Barnes family, which includes Dickie (husband), Imelda (wife), their teenage daughter Cassandra (“Cass”), and her younger brother “PJ.” They live in a small town in Ireland, not far from Dublin. Dickie has taken over his father Maurice’s successful car dealership and garage, and the family is well respected in the town. Despite this focus on one family, however, family dynamics are not at the heart of this novel. Rather, it consists mostly of separate portraits of its members and what happens to them. Among these portraits, Dickie is the main protagonist, portrayed as a perennial loser with a tendency to make reckless decisions or non-decisions. Cass is a rebellious teenager until she – temporarily – escapes the confines of the town by attending college in Dublin. For most of the book, PJ plays a rather limited role, while Imelda gets her fair share of attention as a poorly educated, consumerist housewife.       

Everything could go on with the repetitive events of small-town life until an economic crisis strikes, destroying the economic foundation of the Barnes family’s fragile domestic balance. Money becomes scarce and conflicts increase. Imelda is forced to sell most of her possessions, while her relationship with Dickie becomes a one-sided screaming match. Dickie escapes by pursuing the construction of a “bunker,” a small cabin in the woods that is part of his property, pushed by his friend Victor.

One day, Maurice returns temporarily from his retirement home in Portugal, partly to see how bad things are with the company he founded. Accountants discover that a substantial amount of money has gone missing, and Dickie, as manager, is the only person who could have taken it. However, he shirks responsibility and avoids being confronted by his father, who soon has to return to Portugal. Why Dickie does not want to be questioned becomes clear when we learn that when he was at college in Dublin, he lived in a dormitory, essentially sharing accommodation with a man in an enthusiastic and emotionally satisfying homosexual relationship. He broke off this relationship when his brother, Frank, died in a car accident shortly before he was to marry Imelda. Although Dickie did not know her before, he took Frank’s place and married her. At their wedding, Imelda was unable to lift her veil because she had suffered a “bee sting” in one of her eyes. In fact, her father, who was pretending to drive her to the church, was so angry about her marrying Dickie that he punched her in the face with his fist.

            Dickie’s homosexual past catches up with him when irregularities begin to occur in the repair department of his garage. A Polish mechanic seems to have removed converters from customers’ cars. Instead of firing him immediately, as the foreman urges, he keeps him on. Worse, he begins a wild four-week homosexual relationship with him. To make matters worse for Dickie, the mechanic has all of this on his cell phone and starts blackmailing him. The money missing from the company’s accounts was used to pay for his demands. Of course, Dickie is not willing to tell everyone what happened, either earlier in Dublin or now at the dealership. He wants to protect his family, or maybe even himself. He is too afraid of the shame and the consequences that would likely follow.

            Maurice returned to Portugal to attend to other matters, and also because he was fed up with how his son avoided seeing him. Cass starts college in Dublin, paid for by Maurice, and things could have gone on like this forever. Until Dickie gets a message on his cell phone from the said mechanic demanding more money. While Victor strongly suggests that Dickie should just shoot him with the gun he bought, PJ realizes that his father had problems that he did not understand and therefore could not try to solve. So he travels to Dublin to ask Cass to come home and talk to Dickie, who has since decided to kill the blackmailer in the woods where he was supposed to hand over the money. Little do PJ and Cass know that the meeting place with the blackmailer is the very “bunker” they played in as kids. So, after arriving on the bus, they walk towards the “bunker,” even though it is already dark and raining heavily, making it hard for them to find their way. All the while, Dickie is lying in wait with the gun, ready to shoot the blackmailer as soon as he shows up.

            The book ends with just two sentences on the last page: “It is for love. You are doing this for love.”

MHN

Nonthaburi, Thailand

16 September 2024