Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
-25% $16.43$16.43
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
$13.91$13.91
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: WebThrifter
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Audible sample Sample
Skippy Dies: A Novel Paperback – August 30, 2011
Purchase options and add-ons
From the author of THE BEE STING, a New York Times Top 10 Best Books of the Year and shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize.
The bestselling and critically acclaimed novel from Paul Murray, Skippy Dies, shortlisted for the 2010 Costa Book Awards, longlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Why does Skippy, a fourteen-year-old boy at Dublin's venerable Seabrook College, end up dead on the floor of the local doughnut shop?
Could it have something to do with his friend Ruprecht Van Doren, an overweight genius who is determined to open a portal into a parallel universe using ten-dimensional string theory?
Could it involve Carl, the teenage drug dealer and borderline psychotic who is Skippy's rival in love?
Or could "the Automator"―the ruthless, smooth-talking headmaster intent on modernizing the school―have something to hide?
Why Skippy dies and what happens next is the subject of this dazzling and uproarious novel, unraveling a mystery that links the boys of Seabrook College to their parents and teachers in ways nobody could have imagined. With a cast of characters that ranges from hip-hop-loving fourteen-year-old Eoin "MC Sexecutioner" Flynn to basketball playing midget Philip Kilfether, packed with questions and answers on everything from Ritalin, to M-theory, to bungee jumping, to the hidden meaning of the poetry of Robert Frost, Skippy Dies is a heartfelt, hilarious portrait of the pain, joy, and occasional beauty of adolescence, and a tragic depiction of a world always happy to sacrifice its weakest members. As the twenty-first century enters its teenage years, this is a breathtaking novel from a young writer who will come to define his generation.
- Print length672 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
- Publication dateAugust 30, 2011
- Dimensions5.78 x 1.14 x 8.13 inches
- ISBN-100865478619
- ISBN-13978-0865478619
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may ship from close to you
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Extravagantly entertaining . . . One of the great pleasures of this novel is how confidently [Paul Murray] addresses such disparate topics as quantum physics, video games, early-20th-century mysticism, celebrity infatuation, drug dealing, Irish folklore and pornography.” ―Dan Kois, The New York Times Book Review
“Murray's humor and inventiveness never flag. And despite a serious theme--what happens to boys and men when they realize the world isn't the sparkly planetarium they had hoped for--Skippy Dies leaves you feeling hopeful and hungry for life. Just not for doughnuts.” ―Entertainment Weekly, Grade: A
“Dazzling . . . If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it's nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pulls off in this hilarious, moving and wise book . . . It's the Moby Dick of Irish prep schools . . . Murray is an expansive writer, bouncing around in time, tense and point of view.” ―Jess Walter, Washington Post Book World
“He really does die. It's in the opening scene. But as Paul Murray's novel backtracks to explain what brought about his death.” ―Radhika Jones, Time magazine
“[Murray] gets away with almost everything, owing to the strength of his remarkable dialogue, which captures the free-associative, sex-obsessed energy of teen-age conversation in all its coarse, riffing brilliance.” ―The New Yorker (Briefly Noted)
“This epic page-turner sweeps you along with the heedless gusto of youth.” ―People
“Deeply funny, deeply weird and unlike anything you've ever encountered before.” ―NPR.org
“The novel is a triumph . . . Brimful of wit, narrative energy and a real poetry and vision.” ―Adam Lively, The Sunday Times
“A real joy.” ―Marie Claire
“One of the most enjoyable, funny and moving reads of this young new year.” ―Patrick Ness, The Guardian
“An utterly engrossing read.” ―Elle
“Noisy, hilarious, tragic, and endlessly inventive . . . Murray's writing is just plain brilliant.” ―Kate Saunders, The Times
“A blast of a book.” ―Kevin Power, The Irish Times
“Darkly funny and wholly enjoyable . . . Murray will never once lose your attention, writing with wit and charm and making this tragicomedy both hilarious and effortlessly moving.” ―Very Short List
“A total knockout.” ―The Christian Science Monitor
“A refreshing break from the simple, bloglike prose of more popular novels . . . A most entertaining book from an excellent writer.” ―Dallas Morning News
“A great, early fall read . . . Bursting with plot and characters.” ―San Antonio Express-News
“When I tell you there's a scene towards the end of Paul Murray's Skippy Dies, where I was struggling to maintain my composure while reading on the New York subway, I hope you'll understand just how powerful this novel is. And the fantastic thing is: Just a few hundred pages earlier, I was fighting off a major case of the giggles on an airplane because there's another scene in this book that is hysterically funny, that takes its joke and just keeps turning the dial a little bit further until . . . well, until I was about to explode anyway.” ―Ron Hogan, Beatrice.com
“A triumph.” ―Bookforum online
“This novel is going straight to the top of my best books of 2010 list.” ―Baby Got Books
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Skippy Dies
A NovelBy Paul MurrayFaber & Faber
Copyright © 2011 Paul MurrayAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780865478619
In winter months, from his seat in the middle desk of the middle row, Howard used to look out the window of the History Room and watch the whole school go up in flames. The rugby pitches, the basketball court, the car park and the trees beyond – for one beautiful instant everything would be engulfed; and though the spell was quickly broken – the light deepening and reddening and flattening out, leaving the school and its environs intact – you would know at least that the day was almost over.
Today he stands at the head of the class: the wrong angle and the wrong time of year to view the sunset. He knows, however, that fifteen minutes remain on the clock, and so, pinching his nose, sighing imperceptibly, he tries again. ‘Come on, now. The main protagonists. Just the main ones. Anybody?’
The torpid silence remains undisturbed. The radiators are blazing, though it is not particularly cold outside: the heating system is elderly and erratic, like most things at this end of the school, and over the course of the day the heat builds to a swampy, malarial fug. Howard complains, of course, like the other teachers, but he is secretly not ungrateful; combined with the powerful soporific effects of history itself, it means the disorder levels of his later classes rarely extend beyond a low drone of chatter and the occasional paper aeroplane.
‘Anyone?’ he repeats, looking over the class, deliberately ignoring Ruprecht Van Doren’s upstretched hand, beneath which the rest of Ruprecht strains breathlessly. The rest of the boys blink back at Howard as if to reproach him for disturbing their peace. In Howard’s old seat, Daniel ‘Skippy’ Juster stares catatonically into space, for all the world as if he’s been drugged; in the back-row suntrap, Henry Lafayette has made a little nest of his arms in which to lay his head. Even the clock sounds like it’s half asleep.
‘We’ve been talking about this for the last two days. Are you telling me no one can name a single one of the countries involved? Come on, you’re not getting out of here till you’ve shown me that you know this.’
‘Uruguay?’ Bob Shambles incants vaguely, as if summoning the answer from magical vapours.
‘No,’ Howard says, glancing down at the book spread open on his lectern just to make sure. ‘Known at the time as “the war to end all wars”,’ the caption reads, below a picture of a vast, water-logged moonscape from which all signs of life, natural or man-made, have been comprehensively removed.
‘The Jews?’ Ultan O’Dowd says.
‘The Jews are not a country. Mario?’
‘What?’ Mario Bianchi’s head snaps up from whatever he is attending to, probably his phone, under the desk. ‘Oh, it was … it was – ow, stop – sir, Dennis is feeling my leg! Stop feeling me, feeler!’
‘Stop feeling his leg, Dennis.’
‘I wasn’t, sir!’ Dennis Hoey, all wounded innocence.
On the blackboard, ‘MAIN’ – Militarism, Alliances, Industrialization, Nationalism – copied out of the textbook at the start of class, is slowly bleached out by the lowering sun. ‘Yes, Mario?’
‘Uh …’ Mario prevaricates. ‘Well, Italy …’
‘Italy was in charge of the catering,’ Niall Henaghan suggests.
‘Hey,’ Mario warns.
‘Sir, Mario calls his wang Il Duce,’ says Dennis.
‘Sir!’
‘Dennis.’
‘But he does – you do, I’ve heard you. “Time to rise, Duce,” you say. “Your people await you, Duce.”’
‘At least I have a wang, and am not a boy with … Instead of a wang, he has just a blank piece of …’
‘I feel we’re straying off the point here,’ Howard intervenes. ‘Come on, guys. The protagonists of the First World War. I’ll give you a clue. Germany. Germany was involved. Who were Germany’s allies – yes, Henry?’ as Henry Lafayette, whatever he is dreaming of, emits a loud snort. Hearing his name, he raises his head and gazes at Howard with dizzy, bewildered eyes.
‘Elves?’ he ventures.
The classroom explodes into hysterics.
‘Well, what was the question?’ Henry asks, somewhat woundedly.
Howard is on the brink of accepting defeat and beginning the class all over again. A glance at the clock, however, absolves him from any further effort today, so instead he directs them back to the textbook, and has Geoff Sproke read out the poem reproduced there.
‘“In Flanders Fields”,’ Geoff obliges. ‘By Lieutenant John McCrae.’
‘John McGay,’ glosses John Reidy.
‘That’s enough.’
‘“In Flanders fields,”’ Geoff reads, ‘“the poppies blow”:
‘Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived –’
At this point the bell rings. In a single motion the daydreaming and somnolent snap awake, grab their bags, stow their books and move as one for the door. ‘For tomorrow, read the end of the chapter,’ Howard calls over the melee. ‘And while you’re at it, read the stuff you were supposed to read for today.’ But the class has already fizzed away, and Howard is left as he always is, wondering if anyone has been listening to a single thing he’s said; he can practically see his words crumpled up on the floor. He packs away his own book, wipes clean the board and sets off to fight his way through the home-time throng to the staff room.
In Our Lady’s Hall, hormonal surges have made giants and midgets of the crowd. The tang of adolescence, impervious to deodorant or opened windows, hangs heavy, and the air tintinnabulates with bleeps, chimes and trebly shards of music as two hundred mobile phones, banned during the school day, are switched back on with the urgency of divers reconnecting to their oxygen supply. From her alcove a safe elevation above it, the plaster Madonna with the starred halo and the peaches-and-cream complexion pouts coquettishly at the rampaging maleness below.
‘Hey, Flubber!’ Dennis Hoey scampers across Howard’s path to waylay William ‘Flubber’ Cooke. ‘Hey, I just wanted to ask you a question?’
‘What?’ Flubber immediately suspicious.
‘Uh, I was just wondering – are you a bummer tied to a tree?’
Brows creasing, Flubber – fourteen stone and on his third trip through second year – turns this over.
‘It’s not a trick or anything,’ promises Dennis. ‘I just wanted to know, you know, if you’re a bummer tied to a tree.’
‘No,’ Flubber resolves, at which Dennis takes flight, declaring exuberantly, ‘Bummer on the loose! Bummer on the loose!’ Flubber lets out a roar and prepares to give chase, then stops abruptly and ducks off in the other direction as the crowd parts and a tall, cadaverous figure comes striding through.
Father Jerome Green: teacher of French, coordinator of Seabrook’s charitable works, and by some stretch the school’s most terrifying personage. Wherever he goes it is with two or three bodies’ worth of empty space around him, as if he’s accompanied by an invisible retinue of pitchfork-wielding goblins, ready to jab at anyone who happens to be harbouring an impure thought. As he passes, Howard musters a weak smile; the priest glares back at him the same way he does at everyone, with a kind of ready, impersonal disapproval, so adept at looking into man’s soul and seeing sin, desire, ferment that he does it now like ticking a box.
Sometimes Howard feels dispiritedly as if not one thing has changed here in the ten years since he graduated. The priests in particular bring this out in him. The hale ones are still hale, the doddery ones still dodder; Father Green still collects canned food for Africa and terrorizes the boys, Father Laughton still gets teary-eyed when he presents the works of Bach to his unheeding classes, Father Foley still gives ‘guidance’ to troubled youngsters, invariably in the form of an admonition to play more rugby. On bad days Howard sees their endurance as a kind of personal rebuke – as if that almost-decade of life between matriculation and his ignominious return here had, because of his own ineptitude, been rolled back, struck from the record, deemed merely so much fudge.
Of course this is pure paranoia. The priests are not immortal. The Holy Paraclete Fathers are experiencing the same problem as every other Catholic order: they are dying out. Few of the priests in Seabrook are under sixty, and the newest recruit to the pastoral programme – one of an ever-dwindling number – is a young seminarian from somewhere outside Kinshasa; when the school principal, Father Desmond Furlong, fell ill at the beginning of September, it was a layman – economics teacher Gregory L. Costigan – who took the reins, for the first time in Seabrook’s history.
Leaving behind the wood-panelled halls of the Old Building, Howard passes up the Annexe, climbs the stairs, and opens, with the usual frisson of weirdness, the door marked ‘Staff-room’. Inside, a half-dozen of his colleagues are kvetching, marking homework or changing their nicotine patches. Without addressing anyone or otherwise signalling his presence, Howard goes to his locker and throws a couple of books and a pile of copies into his briefcase; then, moving crab-like to avoid eye contact, he steals out of the room again. He clatters back down the stairs and the now-deserted corridor, eyes fixed deter-minedly on the exit – when he is arrested by the sound of a young female voice.
It appears that, although the bell for the end of the school day rang a good five minutes ago, class in the Geography Room is still in full swing. Crouching slightly, Howard peers through the narrow window set in the door. The boys inside show no sign of impatience; in fact, by their expressions, they are quite oblivious to the passage of time.
The reason for this stands at the head of the class. Her name is Miss McIntyre; she is a substitute. Howard has caught glimpses of her in the staff room and on the corridor, but he hasn’t yet managed to speak to her. In the cavernous depths of the Geography Room, she draws the eye like a flame. Her blonde hair has that cascading quality you normally see only in TV ads for shampoo, complemented by a sophisticated magnolia two-piece more suited to a boardroom than a transition-year class; her voice, while soft and melodious, has at the same time an ungainsayable quality, an undertone of command. In the crook of her arm she cradles a globe, which while she speaks she caresses absently as if it were a fat, spoiled housecat; it almost seems to purr as it revolves langorously under her fingertips.
‘… just beneath the surface of the Earth,’ she is saying, ‘temperatures so high that the rock itself is molten – can anyone tell me what it’s called, this molten rock?’
‘Magma,’ croak several boys at once.
‘And what do you call it, when it bursts up onto the Earth’s surface from a volcano?’
‘Lava,’ they respond tremulously.
‘Excellent! And millions of years ago, there was an enormous amount of volcanic activity, with magma boiling up over the entire surface of the Earth non-stop. The landscape around us today –’ she runs a lacquered fingernail down a swelling ridge of mountain ‘– is mostly the legacy of this era, when the whole planet was experiencing dramatic physical changes. I suppose you could call it Earth’s teenage years!’
The class blushes to its collective roots and stares down at its textbook. She laughs again, and spins the globe, snapping it under her fingertips like a musician plucking the strings of a double bass, then catches sight of her watch. ‘Oh my gosh! Oh, you poor things, I should have let you out ten minutes ago! Why didn’t someone say something?’
The class mumbles inaudibly, still looking at the book.
‘Well, all right …’ She turns to write their homework on the blackboard, reaching up so that her skirt rises to expose the back of her knees; moments later the door opens, and the boys troop reluctantly out. Howard, affecting to study the photographs on the noticeboard of the Hillwalking Club’s recent outing to Djouce Mountain, watches from the corner of his eye until the flow of grey jumpers has ceased. When she fails to appear, he goes back to investi–
‘Oh!’
‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry.’ He hunkers down beside her and helps her re-amass the pages that have fluttered all over the gritty corridor floor. ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you. I was just rushing back to a … a meeting …’
‘That’s all right,’ she says, ‘thanks,’ as he places a sheaf of Ordnance Survey maps on top of the stack she’s gathered back in her arms. ‘Thank you,’ she repeats, looking directly into his eyes, and continuing to look into them as they rise in unison to their feet, so that Howard, finding himself unable to look away, feels a brief moment of panic, as if they have somehow become locked together, like those apocryphal stories you hear about the kids who get their braces stuck together while kissing and have to get the fire brigade to cut them out.
‘Sorry,’ he says again, reflexively.
‘Stop apologizing,’ she laughs.
He introduces himself. ‘I’m Howard Fallon. I teach History. You’re standing in for Finian Ó Dálaigh?’
‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘Apparently he’s going to be out till Christmas, whatever happened to him.’
‘Gallstones,’ Howard says.
‘Oh,’ she says.
Howard wishes he could unsay gallstones. ‘So,’ he rebegins effortfully, ‘I’m actually on my way home. Can I give you a lift?’
She cocks her head. ‘Didn’t you have a meeting?’
‘Yes,’ he remembers. ‘But it isn’t really that important.’
‘I have my own car, thanks all the same,’ she says. ‘But I suppose you could carry my books, if you like.’
‘Okay,’ Howard says. Possibly the offer is ironic, but before she can retract it he removes the stack of binders and textbooks from her hands and, ignoring the homicidal looks from a small clump of her pupils still mooning about the corridor, walks alongside her towards the exit.
‘So, how are you finding it?’ he asks, attempting to haul the conversation to a more equilibrious state. ‘Have you taught much before, or is this your first time?’
‘Oh –’ she blows upwards at a wayward strand of golden hair ‘– I’m not a teacher by profession. I’m just doing this as a favour for Greg, really. Mr Costigan, I mean. God, I’d forgotten about this Mister, Miss stuff. It’s so funny. Miss McIntyre.’
‘Staff are allowed to use first names, you know.’
‘Mmm … Actually I’m quite enjoying being Miss McIntyre. Anyhow, Greg and I were talking one day and he was saying they were having problems finding a good substitute, and it so happens that once upon a time I had fantasies of being a teacher, and I was between contracts, so I thought why not?’
‘What’s your field normally?’ He holds open the main door for her and they step out into the autumn air, which has grown cold and crisp.
‘Investment banking?’
Howard receives this information with a studied neutrality, then says casually, ‘I used to work in that area myself, actually. Spent about two years in the City. Futures, primarily.’
Excerpted from Skippy Dies by Paul Murray. Copyright © 2010 by Paul Murray. Published in 2010 by Faber And Faber, Inc. All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.
Continues...
Excerpted from Skippy Dies by Paul Murray Copyright © 2011 by Paul Murray. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint edition (August 30, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 672 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0865478619
- ISBN-13 : 978-0865478619
- Item Weight : 1.12 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.78 x 1.14 x 8.13 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #32,383 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #741 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
- #2,897 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
The story begins in the first book, called "Hopeland," and continues through the next two books, "Heartland" and "Ghostland." In the very first scene at Ed's Doughnut House on a Friday evening in November, 14-year old Skippy, whose real name is Daniel Juster, is having a doughnut-eating race with his friend Ruprecht Van Doren, who boasts that he has not been beaten in "fifteen consecutive races." But something goes wrong and (this is not a spoiler) Skippy dies after leaving the words "Tell Lori" written in jam filling on the floor. And then the author takes his readers back to fall term at Seabrook College, the oldest Catholic boys' school in Ireland -- to find out exactly what brought things to this point.
Skippy is a student who boards at Seabrook. Until just shortly before midterm, Skippy had been an excellent student, is on the school's swim team, and generally liked, but his grades have been falling recently. Skippy enjoys playing a video game called "Hopeland," a kind of mystic quest, which will increase in importance as the story goes on. He shares a room with Ruprecht, whose goal is to study at Stanford, and has a lab in the basement where he conducts experiments which he hopes will lead him to the secret origins of the universe. Skippy's other friends include Dennis, who is an "arch-cynic, whose very dreams are sadistic, hates the world and everything in it..." He also has Geoff, Niall and Mario as friends, although these characters (and many of the other boys around Skippy) are really less developed as characters than Ruprecht and Dennis. After thinking he sees a UFO one day, Skippy looks through Ruprecht's telescope and sees a girl throwing a Frisbee. This is Lori, a girl from St. Brigid's, a "smoking-hot" girl who immediately captures Skippy's attention. The problem is that another Seabrook boy, Barry, has become infatuated with Lori, and Barry is bad news.
But this book is not just about the boys of Seabrook -- the school's faculty and staff are just as much a part of the story. One of the main characters is Howard Fallon, the school's history teacher, who himself graduated from Seabrook some ten years back, and is haunted by an episode from his past. There's Father Green, the French teacher, whose name the boys have translated into French as "Pere-vert". His calling, as he sees it, is to snuff out sin, but at the same time, he feels he must keep Skippy in a state of innocence. He has his own inner demons to deal with as well. Then there's Greg Costigan, the acting principal of Seabrook in the absence of Father Furlong, who has suffered a recent heart attack. Costigan is snarkily referred to as "the Automator," and believes that the Paraclete Order is on its last legs, and that the only solution is to modernize the school, with himself at the helm. He believes that Seabrook's history as the oldest Catholic boys' school is brandable -- and that the school's role is to prepare the students to "get up there on the world stage and duke it out with the best of them." He wants to roll with the times and represents progress in a very anti-traditionalist sort of way; he doesn't care that the boys actually learn anything, just that they pass their exams to continue Seabrook's reputation, come what may. The reputation of the school is everything and must remain so, no matter what. Fallon, on the other hand, begins to understand that history is something of value -- and that teaching others to care about the past may be just as important as throwing them into the competitive capitalist arena.
Although Skippy Dies is often so funny you can't help but laugh out loud (for example, there's a scene where the boys' English teacher has just gone over the meaning of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and one of the kids takes his interpretation to a whole new level), the story is at times tragic and heartbreaking. It's a good look at how these teenagers understand and interpret themselves in the face of today's world (including sex and drug use) how they see adults, and how despair can cause loss of hope and yet for some, become a building experience. It's about the hold of memory on the human psyche and the importance of remembering. There are other themes at work as well -- including the socio-economic situation of modern Ireland and the role of the Catholic church in the face of all of the scandals that dog it -- making this very long book just fly by.
I loved this book. Absolutely. It's extremely well written, although it does get bogged down a bit for a short time in the middle. But on the whole, it is most excellent. I have absolutely zero qualms about recommending it. It is so good you will not be able to stop reading it. I really hope it becomes a runaway bestseller.
For this heavy backdrop, however, Murray has a light touch. The teens' interactions are deft and charming, even when they are cruel. Skippy Dies is the finest kind of page-turner, one built of its own momentum and powered by compelling characters instead of artificial cliffhangers. Murray doesn't mock or satirize his characters, but he cloaks their darkness in daylight. He reminds us that of that moment where we each realized that teenage angst is universal, that we were both bullied and bullies, and that the insecurity we felt was the reflection of the insecurity we created in others. His Dublin can be lonely and can be funny, but mostly it is familiar.
Top reviews from other countries
Skippy, a shy boy studying in a Catholic boarding school in Ireland. Skippy's overweight roommate, Ruprecht, loves donuts (no wonder he's my favourite character) and wants to go to Stanford to pursue a career in science. Howard the Coward, history teacher who majorly screws up his love life. Carl, the most dangerous kid in school and is high most of the time. And Lorelei, a girl who Skippy is falling in love with. After Skippy's death, it becomes obvious that something is troubling him. Skippy's death opens up a lot of issues sorrounding the fictional Seabrook College and its students.
This book explores so many things, teenagers struggling with hormones, their emotions, drugs, parental issues. It is a book about boys trying to make their way out in the world. Paul Murray has managed to write a book with so many characters, their respective themes and plots without feeling forced or manipulative. I loved the portrayal of school kids, their parents, teachers, friendship, first love, betrayal, and how everything just came together in the end.
Most of the book's elements can't be talked about without spoilers, so just go and read this amazing book. The contrast of the kids growing up and finding out life is not a cakewalk, and the adults dealing with what it is like to be grown up is magnificently written. Out of various subplots, science and philosophies, Murray has created magic through words. The book is funny, emotional and unpredictable. In the face of this book, all words seem superficial; a simple review just doesn't do justice. This is a brilliant book with unexpected twists and turns, a must read for everyone who wants to laugh and cry at the same time.
In these pages are the hilarious exploits of students and teachers alike in an exclusive Catholic boy's school in Ireland. Mercifully having avoided recent scandals, we are told, this is a school with a history and a tower that is nothing at all like Hogwarts school! We meet the boy genius who spouts string theory, a school psychopath drugs dealer, a teacher who is following the maxim "if you can't do it, teach", a school administrator who spouts management speak and Skippy - named for his teeth, and his resemblance to the bush kangaroo when it tries to speak.
The book opens with Skippy's death, but then flashes back to the lead up to this event. What appears to be a choking incident gradually unfolds as something quite different.
Try as I might, I could not help but like Skippy. The characterisations in this book are very good, and the writing is interesting too. Sometimes it was all a bit too trendy for a non Man Booker reader such as myself. The book could maybe have been shorter, and the dialogue could have been less experimental in places. It all seemed written to conform to a vogue for a certain style of contemporary fiction that I suspect we will not value in 100 years time.
For that reason, this won't be my favourite read of the year. Also, the subject matter is dark in places, sometimes menacing, and sometimes just unattractive.
But whilst it won't be a popular mass read, I think it deserves its place on the Booker long list, because this is a very intelligent book. The writer is an astute observer of his society, and he presents it in a manner that is occasionally tongue in cheek, but often very profound.
I could imagine quoting portions of this text. He explores some interesting questions too. A teacher on the verge of a breakdown argues with the acting principle on the lines of "we should teach the children the truth", to the obvious but depressingly real reply on the lines of "no, we teach them whatever it takes to pass their exam".
This book is full of such insights. It is a sad book at times and a depressing one at others, but the humour offsets it. The language was strong in places - but this was, after all, set in a boy's school!
So all in all this is a wonderful and recommended book. Maybe not my favourite, but one of the most profound I have read in a long while. I am also glad it did not actually win the Booker prize, as I can now continue to proudly say that I never yet read a Booker prize winner.
Dazu kommt dann sogar noch die schöne Aufmachung des Romans: drei unterschiedlich gestaltete Bücher in einem hübschen Schuber.