Paul Murray is not going to tell me exactly what went down in the much-discussed final pages of his Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Bee Sting. If you’ve read his expansive tragicomic novel, which follows the lives of the dysfunctional Barnes family after Ireland’s financial crash, you’ll likely have an opinion on its ending. Readers have shared theories online, on BookTok there’s been shock and even some anger - there’s even a dedicated Reddit thread.

“The ending caused a lot of internet debate, but I don’t involve myself with any of that,” Murray tells me before his appearance this week at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

Will he give me a clue? “No! I could, but every interpretation is valid,” he says, before adding that perhaps not every interpretation; someone told him they thought that one of the main characters had hallucinated the entire thing.

That would be infuriating, up there with “but it was all a dream”. “I would not do that! When you go to writing school, that’s one of the first things they say: please, don’t make it a dream twist.”

Murray, who grew up in Dublin, where he lives with his wife and son, published his first novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, while studying a masters in creative writing at the University of East Anglia in 2003. His next, Skippy Dies, was long-listed for the Booker in 2010, and five years after that came The Mark and the Void. He then spent five years writing The Bee Sting – which he’s now spent more than a year promoting. Talking about it for so long must almost feel as arduous as writing it?

“It’s a big book, there’s a lot in it, and people ask different things, so I haven’t really got sick of it. I’m worried that people are sick of hearing my voice, though.”

He was genuinely shocked by the response to the novel. “It’s a lot of things that aren’t … fashionable. It’s a very long book; it’s written by a middle-aged man; it’s got a very complicated plot; it’s got a lot of grief and sadness in it,” he says, “and I didn’t think that people would necessarily connect with it.”

Initially, Murray had planned to write a comedy – “a short, fun book” – but when he sat down to write, he didn’t feel comedic.

“I felt like there was a lot going on in the world that was … really troubling,” he says. “I found myself thinking, well, I could grind out this comedy, or I can take a chance and write about all these problems that everybody’s having.”

The resulting novel, despite some darkly funny moments, was far from a short, lighthearted book, taking in everything from familial drama to economics, grief, trauma and climate change.

“I guess that explains the response to the book – the things that were haunting me about the way life feels at the moment are troubling everybody,” he says. “Everybody’s got a family, of one sort or another, and equally, everybody is worrying about the same things – what your kid sees on their phone or climate change, or whatever it might be.”

The changing climate is woven throughout The Bee Sting, and Murray is surprised it’s not a backdrop to more contemporary fiction.

“It’s really upsetting to see the world just pretending it’s not happening,” he says. “And writers and creators, I think, are part of that – you don’t want every book to be about climate change, because it’s such a difficult problem … but at the same time, just ignoring it? I don’t want to be just producing work like, fiddling while Rome burns; just [making] more entertainment while the planet disintegrates.”

We compare notes on the similarities between Ireland and Australia and our respective attitudes to climate change – climate denial; both countries’ love affairs with cars; the bizarre resentment many car drivers seem to have for cyclists.

“Ireland is not a very industrialised country at all, there are lots of green fields so you might expect it to be sort of … eco and socialist, but it’s absolutely not!” Murray says.

The Bee Sting’s chapters are told from the perspective of different members of the Barnes family, and it’s through 17-year-old Cass that Murray addresses climate concerns. “Teenage girls feel things quite ‘profoundly’, and I think that generation and the next one feel the climate change thing more intensely because they’ve grown up with it – and they can see my generation completely failing to address it,” he says.

In 2010’s Skippy Dies, Murray captured the excitement and misery of being a teenage boy, and in The Bee Sting he equally nailed the voice of teenage girls. “I wouldn’t have done it if it didn’t feel natural,” he says. “And also, there is an idea in the book that we’re more alike than we are different – two people that couldn’t seem more different are a teenage girl and a middle-aged man, but at the same time, everybody’s got the same vulnerabilities, everybody feels lonely, everybody feels isolated.”

Reading a lot also helps; he cites Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital and Elena Ferrante’s books as a couple of favourites depicting female teenage friendship.

“And as a kid, I read a lot of Judy Blume books. I remember reading Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, all about periods and getting boobs and nothing that’s happened to me – but I got where she was coming from,” he says, prompting an animated exchange about our favourite Blume books (Murray might be the first man I’ve spoken to who’s read her), and disappointment that our respective tween offspring (Murray has a 12-year-old son) didn’t take to her the same way we had.

“My son is really into … not reading Stephen King, but the idea of Stephen King – he likes the idea of reading horror,” Murray says, and we compare which King novels we read as teenagers.

“My boy is reading The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub. It’s a brilliant story, kind of a quest narrative, and not too horrific.”

Growing up, Murray says his teenage reading was “really ambitious”.

“My dad was a university professor, so we had lots of books, but I don’t know how much I really understood them. I remember reading Camus’ The Outsider and not really getting it. But I wanted to read important or profound books, books that would make me look cool,” he says with a laugh. “I read A Clockwork Orange and Catch-22 and I remember my English teacher saying, ‘where did you get that?’ My mum had forgotten there were a lot of prostitutes and so on!”

While he has some “vague ideas” for his next novel, Murray isn’t settling into anything until he’s finished promoting The Bee Sting. But he’s just finished the first draft of a kids’ book.

Loading

“I don’t know if you could call it full-on fantasy, but it’s got some magical elements in it,” he reveals.

And no, it’s not going to be a 600-page epic. “I was going to say, kids don’t read 600-page books, but they do – look at Harry Potter! And Philip Pullman’s books are enormous. But the agent did say, don’t make it more than 300 pages.”

A change of pace, Murray is really enjoying writing it. “My son keeps asking me if he can read it and sort of … road-test it, but I’m not sure about the idea of giving it to him and just finding it lying unread by his bed,” he says.

Cast aside for a dog-eared Stephen King paperback?

“Exactly!”

Paul Murray appears at the Melbourne Writers Festival, Familiar Haunts: Paul Murray and Bryan Washington, Saturday, May 11. The Age is a festival partner. The Bee Sting (Penguin) is out now. mwf.com.au