It was bloody hard being 14, wasn’t
it? Brutal. There we all were, not-yet-able to frock up what we really thought
in a veil of grown-up hard-won empathy. The kind of emotional maturity you
only learn from getting smacked over the head repeatedly (metaphorically for
me, literally for many I’m sure), just out of our reach.
I’ve no idea how we all survived.
Skippy – as the title of Paul
Murray’s tragicomic tale of teenage angst in a Catholic boys school not so much
implies as straight out tells you – doesn’t make it.
That’s right. Skippy Dies… in a haze of painkillers in a doughnut house, his
girlfriend a phony, his swim-coach more interested in what’s in his swimming
trunks, his mother dying of cancer, the school Principal convinced there’s
something unwholesome about his sudden interest in frisbee. Plot spoilers,
sorry. But crikey, poor guy.
Such a good title though! And I think it delivers. I found it funny and gripping – even if
some of the peripheral characters are a little obvious (a priest with a
penchant for young boys, anyone?).
Of course Mr Murray is on the wrong track, as far as I'm concerned, about Skippy's mates and their adventures in physics... the thing I understood least in high school science. Forces were a bit ungraspable... M-theory... what???? Put it in a novel and call it sci-fi and I would have thought it was neato, though, so maybe he's not so far off the mark.
But by-and-large Paul Murray remembers, I think, how
it was. He gets how unrelenting and how fragile kids are, or at least how I
remember us. Because, surely, apart from the technology, nothing much has
changed? Not that any teenagers you meet are likely to believe it.
At any rate, every page reminded me
just how breathlessly grateful I am to have reached adulthood, mostly
unscathed.
