My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Here’s another British boarding school novel for you. I mean that as a neutral statement—if you love this sort of thing, Skippy Dies delivers. If you’re tired of it, there’s nothing here to make it worth your while to wade through.
For a lot of us, British boarding schools are Harry Potter and Pink Floyd. Evil teachers, child molestation, a smorgasbord of bullying, indifferent parents. Skippy Dies has all of that. Drug use and abuse, sex, sexual deviance, sexual violence. Forgive me for the easy comparison, but Skippy Dies is like an Irish Irvine Welsh writing about 2nd year students, without out all of the accents spelled out phonetically.
Not that Paul Murray’s writing lacks style. He’s funny at times, sweet, bittersweet, and heavy. Matter-of fact sections juxtaposed with streams of consciousness. He keeps you guessing—magic realism? No, just youthful innocence, set up to be quashed, utterly, by the absolute and total indifference of the universe. This is heavy stuff. Not coming-of-age, so much as coming-of-angst.
No spoiler—Skippy does indeed die, right in the beginning, so we can go back in time and look at the “events” that led to the “tragedy.” The real tragedy, of course, is that death is just another swirly, another spit ball, another brick in the wall. Except that upper-middle class boarding schools don’t produce, eventually, deeply depressed artists who suffer and sing. They just produce more upper-middle class parents who are as indifferent as the universe that used to mystify them.