Paul Murray: Skippy Dies
The guilt of killing off characters
MBP: Congratulations on being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. How did you celebrate the news?
PM: Unfortunately I was unwell the day I found out. My girlfriend went out and celebrated on my behalf. I stayed in with the cat and watched Newsnight.
MBP: Skippy Dies is a comic novel set at the fictional Dublin boarding school Seabrook College for Boys. Although the novel can be very funny, it also tackles serious social issues. How easy is it to weave comedy into tragedy?
PM: I don't find it difficult on the level of construction - my brain seems to find it quite natural to slip from one register to the other. It helped that the book is largely about teenagers, who can veer from one extreme to the other very quickly. I suppose the danger is that if people read something with jokes, they automatically think, Ah, this is a comedy, and then can be blindsided when the darker issues come in. So I did a lot of foregrounding and tried to make sure that although the opening chapters are largely comic, the tragic elements are visible to some degree too. That's partly why Skippy dies on page five. It's unambiguous.
MBP: There are many important characters in Skippy Dies. Did you get quite attached to the characters you created?
PM: I really did. I felt bad when Skippy died - guilty. Does it have to be this way? I found myself asking. The book took such a long time to write that even the minor characters came to have huge back-stories in my mind. Mario, for instance, the sex-addicted Italian boy, I could have written a whole book about him.
MBP: You used to work in a bookshop. Did you always aspire to be on the bookshelves rather than behind the counter?
PM: I have to say that I really loved working in the bookshop. It was one of the great years of my life. I left to go to UEA - at the time the writer John Boyne was working in the same shop, and he encouraged me to apply. I'd been writing for years before that, but if I hadn't worked in the bookshop, who knows, maybe I'd never have finished that novel.
MBP: Skippy Dies took seven years to write. Can you tell us how it felt to finish the novel having been immersed in it for so long?
PM: 'Finishing' a book is quite a complicated idea, because you submit various drafts, and then there are copy-edits, and even when it's published there are months of reviews and promotion. So in some ways it's still very much a part of my life. At the writing stage - I did wonder if I would ever finish it and I fretted about that. But when it was finally done, I felt a mix of things. I was happy and relieved, but it was somewhat bittersweet, because I had such affection for the characters, and for the book itself, and for those seven years of my life, which were tied not just to the book but to a particular place and set of people, and now all of that was ending.
MBP: We hear that Neil Jordan will be directing a film adaptation of Skippy Dies. Can you tell us a bit more about this exciting news?
PM: It's very exciting news, but I wouldn't get carried away just yet. Neil Jordan has bought the option for the book - that's a very different thing to the film actually being made. Still, it's fantastic to have a director of his calibre take an interest in it. I've watched his films since I was a kid, so it's quite a special thing for me. And he's a writer, and he's from Dublin - it would be hard to imagine someone better-qualified to adapt this book.
