Keeping It Surreal

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.”
“We all get exercised about the terrible things the church did now, when it’s safe, but people knew that stuff was going on and I think that’s sort of standard procedure. What I wanted to examine in the book was that even though we live in a kind of post-Catholic society where everything is supposedly more open and transparent – and I don’t know if that’s true – is what would happen if you had a very exclusive institution and it encountered this kind of problem. Would they be open about it or cover it up? It seems to me that power doesn’t change. It may change guise but it acts in the same way – it protects itself to the detriment of whoever is on the bottom.
“Child abuse is just one way in which marginalised, vulnerable people are abused by people at the top. It’s a particularly horrific aspect, but there are all kinds of abuses which we don’t care about. People know most of their clothes are made in sweatshops and no one does anything about it – Kate Moss will still take her million pounds from Topshop to promote whatever they’re producing. Power is all the same.”
The powers-that-be at Seabrook decide on a cover-up and the history teacher Howard (“Howard the Coward”) gets drawn into colluding with the school authorities against his better judgment.
“I think he’s a fair representation of the way most of us are. We are subsumed in institutions because we are afraid of what would happen if we went out on our own. We do things that we don’t necessarily think are right because we are afraid of the consequences. People encounter that every day in their work – hierarchies emerge where people are bullied. Those things are common. Howard’s journey is to realise that these kids are dependent on him.”
As well as being long-listed for this year’s Man Booker prize, film director Neil Jordan has optioned Skippy Dies.
“I’m a huge fan of his work,” says Murray. “He’s from Dublin and he’s a novelist as well. I couldn’t think of a better person to direct the film. There is a big leap between being optioned and actually getting a film made, but fingers crossed!”
Murray will be appearing at this year’s Electric Picnic, but says the author, the details are still sketchy.
“I’m doing something with Chris Binchy, who is a brilliant Irish novelist and a good friend of mine as well, so I’m really excited about it. I’m not sure what we’re doing, but I’m sure it will be fun. I’m really excited because there is a really good line-up this year and I think we get to stay in the performers’ area with all the rock stars. That’ll be amazing!”