There aren’t many books like Paul Murray’s new novel Skippy Dies. It looks different for a start: instead of the hardback you’d expect for the RRP, you get a boxed set of three beautifully designed paperbacks titled Hopeland, Heartland, and Ghostland and Afterland instead. At about 220 pages long, they’re perfect to slip into the pocket for a bus or train ride, while the brief teasers on their back covers in place of carefully culled review quotes conspire to lead you to a more innocent age of reading.
Of course, you can have well-designed books that are still not worth reading. Fortunately, the writing here is, for the most part, so thrilling, so confident, so full of energy that I literally couldn’t wait to progress on to the next volume.
The novel begins in Dublin with the death of Daniel Juster (aka Skippy) during a doughnut eating contest with his genius room mate at Seabrooks school, Ruprecht Von Doren. The Heimlich manoeuvre fails and his face progresses through various stages of the purple spectrum while he desperately traces out a message in raspberry jam for the object of his affections.
It’s an extremely arresting opening, but at this point I was worried the rest of the novel was going to be an exploration of its aftermath. Instead, Murray spends the first two volumes chronicling the events leading up to Daniel’s death. The story here has the predictable elements of any novel set in a boy’s school, from jokes about masturbation to a homicidal bully, from experiments with prescription drugs to a set piece at the school disco with the local girls’ school where the pages all but drip with hormones. Yet it endears you so much to Daniel that you reach his death hoping that the prologue was somehow a trick and that, like Bobby Ewing, he’ll emerge from the shower unscathed. He doesn’t. The third volume deals with the aftermath of his death, and has the one section of the novel where the story threatens to drift into irrelevancy. However, Ruprecht’s scheme to use the school concert as a means to communicate with the dead Daniel via string theory soon re-engages the attention, and ensures a fantastic denouement.
Through all the three volumes, Murray never once settles for only writing a novel about teenagers or about the school itself. Instead, what comes under Murray’s clinical eye as much as the teens is the new Ireland. A Celtic tiger where parents are more in love with money than their children, and where figures of authority ready to brush anything from history to sexual abuse under the carpet if it will maintain appearances. And Seabrooks school is a distillation of all that’s bad and wrong about it. Like a conveyor belt producing the merchant bankers and construction magnates of the future, it comes to symbolise the dreadful reach of the old boy’s network that allows shoddy work to go unpunished and regulations to be flouted, and where playing rugby is valued more highly than any intellect.
Murray doesn’t spare the satire here, particularly when it comes to figures like the Automator, the acting principal of the school in love with managerial planning. But where other novelists may have relied on prompting belly laughs, Murray’s masterstroke is to never let the reader lose sight of the horrible nature of what lies beneath – there are places where you laugh because it’s plain funny, others where your laughter is more nervous.
With adults as corrupt as these, it’s inevitable that innocents like Daniel and Ruprecht will suffer. With his love of computer games and his innocent desire for Lori, the local beauty, Daniel in particular feels like a character stranded in the wrong period. And he finds a curious adult mirror in Howard, a Seabrook alumnus who’s returned to the school under a cloud to teach history. Howard is stuck in a relationship that’s “a grey tapestry of okayness”, and Murray provides a sympathetic and unflinching portrait of his quandary and the compromises that adulthood demands of idealism.
Through Howard and Ruprecht’s actions at the school concert, innocence threatens to have the last word, but it is only a threat. Afterland, the novel’s brief coda, suggests that nothing has changed: full of mundane platitudes, it’s one of the most chilling letters in literature and reminds the reader of the dark heart that’s always been beating below the comic surface.
With its relentless plot and ambitious range of voices, Murray’s novel is an object lesson in how to handle an enormous cast of characters without losing the reader’s interest. There aren’t many books that combine adolescent angst, satire, paedophiles, drug abuse, tragedy and string theory, but when the results are this good, you wish there were more.