Keeping It Surreal

Evoking the surrealism of Flann O’Brien and the social heft of John McGahern PAUL MURRAY’s Skippy Dies has been hailed an instant classic and bagged a Booker Prize long list nomination. The author looks ahead to his spoken-word appearance at Electric Picnic.

Anne Sexton, 09 Sep 2010

Daniel “Skippy” Juster and his friend, the overweight, math-loving near-genius Ruprecht Van Doren, are having a doughnut-eating competition when Skippy keels over. Having ascertained that Skippy hasn’t touched his doughnuts, Ruprecht can do nothing but watch as his friend scribbles his final good-byes in strawberry jam on the floor. Thus opens Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies – a tragicomic 660-page opus, set in the plush surrounds of Seabrook College, an exclusive Catholic boy’s school.

Murray reels the reader back to events leading up to the tragedy, taking in a multitude of characters, themes and intertwining storylines, all of which is interspersed with laugh-out-loud dialogue and sparklingly clever prose. The book is impossible to summarise, and getting the storylines and characters straight must have been one hell of a challenge.

“I thinks that’s probably why it took so long,” concedes Murray. “I had to keep stopping at certain points, working out where everybody was and where everybody needed to go. I had to do charts and maps on the wall with arrows and that kind of thing.”

Skippy Dies covers a number of topics including child sex abuse, the afterlife, folklore, teenage sexuality, the first world war, modern Ireland and M-theory, a rather esoteric branch of particle physics. Given all of this, it’s hardly surprising that the novel took seven years to complete – the research alone must have been daunting.

“The tricky thing about research is that I wasn’t entirely sure what I was researching. I read a couple of books about M-theory and that wasn’t so bad, but the first world war stuff – it took me a long time to work out what angle I wanted to take. You put in a lot of time, which produces nothing, which is strictly speaking wasted but then you’ll come across something that is so incredibly perfect it makes everything worthwhile.”

The child abuse storyline is of course topical, but says Murray, this was not what inspired him.

“Child sex abuse is a very serious issue and I would have been very wary of using it to propel a story. It turns up in a lot of fiction and for that reason I was hesitant initially. Ultimately what I was more interested in was how we deal with abuse, how a big institution would deal with something like that. We bury things. Right through the ‘70s and ‘80s no one talked about sex abuse. In the ’70s Irish Times journalist Michael Viney wrote a whole series on industrial schools. He talked to the kids there and they told him horrendous stories and he wrote about the terrible conditions he encountered in industrial schools. Nobody picked up on the story – people didn’t want to know.”

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