Paul Murray’s Guide To Ireland, Inspired By The Bee Sting

Looking to explore Ireland? Forget all the usual ‘must-visit’ spots – instead, why not give your travels a literary spin and do it through the lens of Dua’s Monthly Read for February, The Bee Sting? The book follows the Barnes’ – dad Dickie, mum Imelda and their teenage children Cass and PJ, as they face financial troubles and the consequences of questionable past decisions (discover more about it in Dua’s interview with author Paul Murray here).

“Most of The Bee Sting is set in an unnamed town in the midlands of Ireland,” says Paul, of his gripping family saga. “I’m not from that part of the country – I grew up in the suburbs of Dublin – so the town is a kind of composite, put together from stories I’ve heard from friends who are from the midlands, as well as my own memories of the village near the border where my mum grew up.”

Along with these shared memories, there are some real-life locations that inspired the book’s settings, from Trinity College, where both Dickie and Cass flee to escape small-town scrutiny to the somewhat sketchy Northside. Here, Paul shares his guide to Ireland, based on the locations in the book...

The Forests: Devil’s Glen, Massy’s Wood, and the Hellfire Club

“A lot of the action in my book takes place in a forest that lies behind the Barnes’ family home. I love forests. Someone once said to me that you’re either a sea person or a forest person. I grew up very near the sea, so I guess I became a forest person out of sheer perversity. When I was a kid, my family used to go on walks in the Devil’s Glen in Ashford and Massy’s Wood and the Hellfire Club (or Montpelier Hill) in Dublin. Those places left a strong impression on me. Even from the names you can pick up the inherent spookiness. It’s easy to get comprehensively lost in a forest – I speak from experience here – and for that reason, they work as sites of transformation in many artworks, from Dante’s Inferno to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twin Peaks.”

Killiney Hill, Dublin

“Another place that made a mark on me when I was young was Killiney Hill, which was about 20 minutes’ walk from my house. It’s on the coast and if you get to the top, you’re rewarded with spectacular views of the bay. Nowadays it’s quite manicured, with a coffee shop and legions of dog walkers. But when I was younger, it was totally overgrown and wild, and there were rumours that Satanists congregated there for occult rituals. I loved the idea that even in the super-boring, anonymous suburbs – as I characterised them at the time – there were zones that defied reason and logic, and seemed even like portals to something and somewhere different and deeper. That’s the role the forest plays in The Bee Sting: it’s a place where all the instruments go haywire, so to speak, where past and present intermingle and the characters keep running into versions of themselves, the people they were and the people they could be.

Trinity College

“Dublin plays a really important role in the book for Dickie, as a young man, and also for Cass, his daughter. It’s somewhere they can be free from small-town surveillance and begin to become who they are. Trinity College is where a lot of the Dublin action takes place. It’s a beautiful 400-year-old campus right in the heart of the city. Like the forests, it’s got a lot of spooky, transformational energy. One of the buildings, the Rubrics, is reputed to be the most haunted building in Ireland. The filmmaker Lenny Abrahamson had rooms there as a student and gave me some crucial last-minute information. As far as I remember, he didn’t have any issues with ghosts. The two debating societies, the Phil (Philosophical Society) and the Hist (Historical Society), also feature. They meet every week in a highly ornate, wood-panelled chamber; there’s a good deal of ceremony and at least one throne. The theatricality was too much for me as a student, but in the book, Dickie is drawn to this idea that life can be a performance.”

The George Pub

“Trinity was a great launchpad from which to explore the city. In the ’90s, Dublin had an abundance of, shall we say, rough-and-tumble energy. It felt edgy but also alive, particularly the nascent club culture, and the gay scene that was emerging at the same time. The George pub, on the corner of George’s Street and Dame Street, was the model for The Butterfly, where Dickie has some formative experiences in the book. In my college days, homosexuality had only recently been decriminalised and was still seen as scandalous, immoral, a ‘danger to our youth’, etc. The George was one of the only gay pubs in the city, and I vividly remember the feeling I got when I first crossed the threshold, a literal transgression. Back in the ’90s, you really needed to be careful leaving. Now, the city is more inclusive.”

The Stag’s Head

“About a minute’s walk from the George is The Stag’s Head, another legendary pub. That’s where Dickie meets his brother when Frank visits the city with Imelda. The Stag’s was a major Trinity hangout when I was a student, and for about 10 years after I graduated, I’d go there most weekends. When The Bee Sting was launched, we had a party there in the basement, which was gate-crashed by a group that turned out to be an Icelandic choir, who’d just been performing in Christ Church Cathedral. They sang us three extraordinarily beautiful songs. I still get the shivers when I think about them.”

The Northside

“Trinity, the George and the Stag’s Head are in the south of the city, which is historically the wealthier, more glamorous side. If you cross Dame Street and go down the alley by Central Bank, you’ll come to the Ha’penny Bridge, which will take you over the Liffey to the Northside – considerably sketchier. I have an office around there where I wrote the first draft of The Bee Sting, and several places that I’d walk by every day made it into the book. Arnotts, one of Dublin’s oldest department stores, is where Imelda, Cass and PJ go to get new clothes before an important dinner. When I was working on the book, I”d go in at lunchtime to use the free Wi-Fi.

“If you follow the tram tracks one way, you quickly get to O’Connell Street and Eason, the bookshop where Cass first sees the strange man in the leather coat. Go the other way, and you pass by the old Fruit Market in Smithfield. This is where PJ gets lost after a fight with Cass, and we encounter the man in the leather coat again. He runs for it and finds himself in a video game shop, which was very close to my office.”

Stoneybatter

“Keep going down the tracks and you come to the Stoneybatter area, which is where Cass and Elaine live after they move to Dublin. I imagined them on the same street where I spent seven happy years. Stoneybatter is home to several excellent pubs, cafés, restaurants, the Lighthouse Cinema, as well as legendary publisher The Lilliput Press. You can walk from there to Phoenix Park, a huge space with a zoo, a free-roving herd of deer and many areas of relative wilderness. I used to run there almost every day; when I’m stuck, nothing else can clear my head. Stoneybatter is also home to the National Museum of Ireland. Right across the street from it in Arbour Hill, the remains of the 1916 revolutionaries are buried. And beside that is a prison for sex offenders. I’m confident that in no other city could you find such a phenomenal mismatch. I love you, Dublin.”