Skippy Dies: A novel
By: Paul Murray
Grade: A+
There are very few novels out there that end up impacting the reader in such a way that he spends two hours straight reading it. Skippy Dies is one of those novels. A masterful work that mixes childish antics, spiritual conquest, existential crises, and science fiction, Skippy Dies is a beautiful piece of work deserving of the utmost praise.
There’s something to be said about a novel whose main premise includes blatantly assuring you of the main protagonists death from the first page. What was remarkable about Skippy Dies is that I was able to read some four-hundred pages into the book before I was reminded that Skippy had perished in only the first three pages. What was even more remarkable was how heartbroken I was.
Murray manages to build a fascinating world with fascinating characters all of which are brilliantly crafted. There are no staple characters here: each and everyone of them have profound back-stories, some untold and some told; they each combine to create the interlocking web of string-stories that weaves itself into this remarkable novel. The characters are bursting to life from the pages, there’s hardly a flat one of the bunch. Even more the book paints a striking look on the true stress of youth (at least I managed to gather that) in which the fourteen year old characters are closer to absolute truth than their forty to fifty year old counterparts.
Skippy Dies is a piece of work that you’ll absolutely love and one that you’ll pick up and devour right away. Murray’s work is so brilliantly unique and inspiring that it seems almost entirely plausible to say that it is Murray himself that is the hidden-meaning of the letter M in the M-theory which populates the pages of Skippy Dies in such a tender and tragic way.
