Review: Skippy Dies

Title: Skippy Dies
Author: Paul Murray
ISBN13: 9700865479432
Origin: Ireland
Length: 672 pp.
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Released: August 2010

Initial Thoughts:

I obtained Skippy Dies at a rep night a couple months ago. That's right, I got it for free, along with some beautiful cookbooks, crossword puzzles, a couple of other novels, as well as some uncategorizable books. I put off reading Skippy Dies for a bit though, because I was sloughing through another book (which you'll inevitably hear me complain about later).

"What is that book?" strangers asked me when they saw me reading it.

"It's about a boy named Skippy."

"Has he died yet?"

"Yeah, he's been dead since the first chapter."

I'd then proceed to give some less-than-stellar summary of the general plot, namely, that Skippy Dies narrates the experiences of a group of characters at a prestigious Irish boarding school before, during, and after Skippy's death. By killing Skippy off in the first pages, Murray insists we ought not to become too attached to him. And who could get attached to a 14-year-old boy and his pervy (& often spoiled) boarding school friends? The comparison we're looking at here is, of course, Harry Potter, but unlike HP & co, Skippy Dies actually breaches the depth of human emotion and paints ambiguous characters who cannot be committed with confidence to either "good" or "bad" categories. Teenagers, it turns out, are great characters: they're pitiable, deplorable, and to Murray's great credit, relatable. And there are plenty of perspectives from equally well-crafted adult characters (teachers, principles, priests) that allow the reader a break from the armory of lame sex jokes made by Skippy's friends.

Title Rating: 5/5


When I first saw this book on display at the store, I thought the title was funny. It's morbid in that Haroldian (i.e., Harold & Maude) sort of way. 


A wise move on Murray's part. Descriptive, pithy, without being too bland.  The Fall of Seabrook College, Skippy Reaches the 11th Dimension, anything like that would have worked, too. But Skippy Dies is just so cleverly ambiguous without being ambiguous at all (I really value ambiguity, as you'll find).

When Skippy dies, a lot of other things do, too. Embedded in the narrative is the story of the diminished role of priests in parochial education, which signals, like the incessant use of technology in the novel, the end of a simpler, shielded era. The teenagers' lives are made transparent through text messages, camera phones, and worst of all, prying adults. The church is also no longer able to shroud itself. Skippy's death is at once tied to a spiritually-bogus (maybe?) priest, but the secular institutions that both prosecute and protect the church are painted as equally dubious.

Thus in a way, the title Skippy Dies signals more than just Skippy's own death. The simultaneous bleakness and humor of the title equips us with both humor and caution in approaching the newly transparent world, the world without "Skippy." The handling of this world by Murray's deeply thought-out characters is entertaining, emotional, and overall just a beautiful rendition of humanity. Highly recommended.