Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
Tom Webber
Sunday 28 February 2010
Adolescence is boring, smelly and above all a protracted affair, something like a long-haul flight. The adult is almost there but vital things are missing. Most people, if sane, do everything in their power to forget it. When his father refuses to compare childhood experiences, one of the characters in Skippy Dies says: "That's the way dads' memories work – like nothing they felt when they were this age was really real."
Paul Murray's second novel is a book that will not allow the ghastly truth of those hairy years to be forgotten. Set in Seabrook, a shambolic Catholic boys' boarding school in Ireland, it is narrated by a generous handful of characters, most importantly "Skippy" and a cohort of his fellow pupils, as well as members of the teaching staff – a mix of creepy priests and washed-up, psychologically damaged civilians.
This is an extraordinarily well-observed portrait of early teenage life, which wonders aloud how it is possible to negotiate such a seemingly callous society, and what that means for the adult environment these people will compose. Here is a world in which everyone, including your friends – in fact, especially your friends – is a gay and/or a spasmo and their mum a slag. The boys of Seabrook are a diverse morass of pubescent horror moulded by their hormones. Their minds are AWOL in computer games, D&D, and whatever drugs they can get. They are obsessed with sex, the closest to which most get is internet pornography or absurdly fantastic boasting. They abandon themselves to painfully ridiculous love stories, pathetic hero-quests and outlandish scientific experiments.
Murray has a precision-tuned ability to inhabit the minds of these unpromising-sounding characters, and even, in spite of all the bullying, swearing and bolshiness, to make them likable. The teachers afford another vein of the same merciless humour, and their lives reflect those of the children. Nostalgia hangs about the book like a vapour, and there is plenty of bittersweet pain as the characters search for something to guide them through the arbitrariness that surrounds them. It is an amazing and humane feat to take such a chaotic state as adolescence, or for that matter the dungeon of dreams that is a school staffroom, and turn it into such brilliant comedy.
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