I'm the product of an Irish Catholic boarding school for boys. In September 1968, at the tender age of 11, I left the warm (over-)protective bosom of home and family -- not just one, but two grandmothers, and a housekeeper to fuss over me while my mother saw patients -- and became one of the 80 or so boys in the first year class at a Franciscan boarding school, about 25 miles north of Dublin, and 160 miles from home. The experience, particularly the first year, was incredibly brutal*. But it was also entirely necessary, and completely transformative. I can trace back almost all of what I consider to be my defining character traits to that first year at Gormanston. I wouldn't consider the time I spent at boarding school the "best years" of my life, but it was definitely formative. The survival strategies I learned there pretty much set the pattern for the rest of my life.

So I approached Skippy Dies with reservations, and a certain amount of trepidation. The defining characteristic of life in a boys' boarding school is tedium - would Paul Murray be able to capture the tedium accurately and still write an interesting book? Would reading it stir up a bunch of memories best left undisturbed? And could the book possibly live up to the considerable hype that it has generated?

It turned out to be pretty amazing. Paul Murray does indeed get boarding school life down right - he completely nails it. His more significant accomplishment is to have written a book whose appeal transcends the specificity of its setting. Skippy Dies is a sprawling, ambitious doorstopper of a book, with an extensive cast of characters (jocks, nerds, priests, lay teachers, parents, drug dealers, psychopaths), not unlike a Dickens story. Fortunately, Murray has the skill to bring these assorted character to life and to tell a story that grabs and keeps the reader's interest.

The main focus of the book is to present the events that led up to the death of 14 year old Skippy and to explore its effect on the school community. Along the way, Murray considers a huge variety of disparate themes, ranging from string theory to ancient Irish burial mounds to trench warfare in World War I. Not to mention the pervasive adolescent obsession with sex. At times it seems as if these are mere digressions in a book that's already quite hefty, but the author knows what he's about, and pulls the various threads of his tapestry together to a powerful and satisfying conclusion. With so many balls in the air, you keep expecting him to crash and burn, but he doesn't -- the writing is superb throughout, the story never flags, you don't want it to stop and are a little bit sad when it does.

What do we ask of a good novel? A question with as many answers as readers (a pointless question if you live in Toronto and are called Buck). I take a slightly old-fashioned view. If an author can create a vividly imagined world, make me care about his characters, and tell a good story that moves me, then I'm a happy camper. Paul Murray does all of these things in this terrific book, and does them so brilliantly that the story transcends the specificity of its particular milieu. Other reviewers have suggested that the book is likely to appeal only to male readers - I couldn't disagree more.

This is a terrific book. The Man Booker judges should hang their heads in shame for their failure to include it on this year's shortlist.


*factors that worked against me included my age (at least 2 years younger than anyone else in my class), my generally spastic performance at all sports (even more unforgivable was my unwillingness to even pretend to care about sports) and - fatally - showing up on the first day only to realize that I was the only kid in the school still outfitted in short pants. I might as well have had a "KICK ME" sign around my neck - my mother carried her guilt about this rare misstep with her to her grave.