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Skippy Dies, by Paul Murray, is a big, messy, very very ambitious novel. The book is about a group of teenagers in a prestigious Catholic boys' school in Dublin, but Murray stretches his framework to include lots of history and mythology, string theory, plenty of references to Robert Graves, hints of the occult, and a heaping helping of contemporary social ills. All this, and humor too.
Murray makes no attempt to surprise readers with the fate of his main character. Skippy dies. It says so in the title, and then it happens in the very first scene. Murray then backtracks and spends 450 pages filling us in on all of the various events that swirl around Skippy and the forces that act on him in the months leading up to his death. The material here is great. Murray is, at times, gut-wrenchingly accurate on the horrific emotional muddle of teenagerhood. You will not want to go back to the days of your youth after reading this book. He also does a great job controlling the tension in this portion of the book, winding it up tight sometimes, then letting it out a bit so you can catch your breath, and then winding it just a little bit tighter. Skippy is the heart of this part of the narrative; I liked him so much and found it so easy to get involved in his day-to-day trials and tribulations that I kept forgetting that everything I was reading was moving inexorably toward his death. So the experience of reading that first section of the book was peppered with little moments of shock when I suddenly remembered that Skippy was going to die, and I had to stop and wonder when and how and why it would happen.
Last time I wrote about this book, I was coming to the end of the section in which Skippy is still alive. I talked about how the book was full of humming undercurrents and unseen forces, how it felt full of magic and darkness and infinite possibilities. Then, far sooner than I expected it (with 200 pages to go), I found the story looping back to that opening scene and Skippy was dead again. Instantly the book slammed into a wall of reality, and all that heady and fantastical sense of possibility came crashing down around the ugly truth of what really happened to Skippy. That felt right, even while I was reading about things that were horribly wrong. The book should by changed by what happened; it should shrink and limp forward to its end. The world should be changed by Skippy's death too but it isn't, and I admire the way Murray digs into that fact, showing us exactly how a terrible event can be painted over and everything can continue as though Skippy had never even lived, let alone died. I was as riveted for 50 pages of this stuff as I had been for the preceding 450, but after that the book began to feel too long. There were still wonderful moments, but they were surrounded by scenes that felt artificial and/or unnecessary. It felt like Murray was piling on a bit at the end, perhaps out of uncertainty about how to bring the whole thing to a close. And of course I wouldn't have been nearly so disappointed in the lacklustre ending if I hadn't so thoroughly loved everything that came before.
So Skippy Dies is a flawed book, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't run out and read it. Murray has a lot to say and he takes risks and it's thrilling to watch a writer do this. His prose is fantastic--he writes the sort of sentences that make me want to sit down and work just so I can try to write those sorts of sentences myself--yet so easy to read that the quality of the sentences is sometimes in danger of slipping by unnoticed. Although it is easy to read, it can be emotionally harrowing. Murray is not afraid of making bad things happen to children. The book features parental neglect (both benign and not), drug abuse, eating disorders, sexual abuse, violence, mental illness, and of course death. It flips back and forth rapidly between being fun to read and being awful to read. Murray makes a couple of missteps--the hijinks sometimes seem just a little too wacky, and his attempts at parodying the lyrics to rap and pop songs are not close enough to the real thing to have the necessary satirical bite--but these are pretty minor flaws in what is, overall, a pretty major achievement.
Murray makes no attempt to surprise readers with the fate of his main character. Skippy dies. It says so in the title, and then it happens in the very first scene. Murray then backtracks and spends 450 pages filling us in on all of the various events that swirl around Skippy and the forces that act on him in the months leading up to his death. The material here is great. Murray is, at times, gut-wrenchingly accurate on the horrific emotional muddle of teenagerhood. You will not want to go back to the days of your youth after reading this book. He also does a great job controlling the tension in this portion of the book, winding it up tight sometimes, then letting it out a bit so you can catch your breath, and then winding it just a little bit tighter. Skippy is the heart of this part of the narrative; I liked him so much and found it so easy to get involved in his day-to-day trials and tribulations that I kept forgetting that everything I was reading was moving inexorably toward his death. So the experience of reading that first section of the book was peppered with little moments of shock when I suddenly remembered that Skippy was going to die, and I had to stop and wonder when and how and why it would happen.
Last time I wrote about this book, I was coming to the end of the section in which Skippy is still alive. I talked about how the book was full of humming undercurrents and unseen forces, how it felt full of magic and darkness and infinite possibilities. Then, far sooner than I expected it (with 200 pages to go), I found the story looping back to that opening scene and Skippy was dead again. Instantly the book slammed into a wall of reality, and all that heady and fantastical sense of possibility came crashing down around the ugly truth of what really happened to Skippy. That felt right, even while I was reading about things that were horribly wrong. The book should by changed by what happened; it should shrink and limp forward to its end. The world should be changed by Skippy's death too but it isn't, and I admire the way Murray digs into that fact, showing us exactly how a terrible event can be painted over and everything can continue as though Skippy had never even lived, let alone died. I was as riveted for 50 pages of this stuff as I had been for the preceding 450, but after that the book began to feel too long. There were still wonderful moments, but they were surrounded by scenes that felt artificial and/or unnecessary. It felt like Murray was piling on a bit at the end, perhaps out of uncertainty about how to bring the whole thing to a close. And of course I wouldn't have been nearly so disappointed in the lacklustre ending if I hadn't so thoroughly loved everything that came before.
So Skippy Dies is a flawed book, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't run out and read it. Murray has a lot to say and he takes risks and it's thrilling to watch a writer do this. His prose is fantastic--he writes the sort of sentences that make me want to sit down and work just so I can try to write those sorts of sentences myself--yet so easy to read that the quality of the sentences is sometimes in danger of slipping by unnoticed. Although it is easy to read, it can be emotionally harrowing. Murray is not afraid of making bad things happen to children. The book features parental neglect (both benign and not), drug abuse, eating disorders, sexual abuse, violence, mental illness, and of course death. It flips back and forth rapidly between being fun to read and being awful to read. Murray makes a couple of missteps--the hijinks sometimes seem just a little too wacky, and his attempts at parodying the lyrics to rap and pop songs are not close enough to the real thing to have the necessary satirical bite--but these are pretty minor flaws in what is, overall, a pretty major achievement.