A bit of an uneven first effort from Murray, whose “Skippy Dies” I really loved. Even so, there is much to enjoy in this novel, with a distinct cast of characters, plenty of laugh-out-loud moments while still dealing with serious themes of war, addiction, poverty, suicide and more. Not a “must read” like Skippy, but unlike a number of books I have read recently which felt in retrospect like a poor use of my time, I have no regrets and look forward to more of Paul Murray.

It would be nice if Goodreads could tell that there is more than one Paul Murray and didn’t lump together the Christian writer with the novelist; I am 99% certain they are not the same person.

Re-read in July 2013.

Names: Amaurot:"the shadowy or unknown place," the main city in the centre of the island Utopia.
Hythloday:"expert in nonsense", the voyager who travels around Utopia.
Telsinor: The name of the fictional phone company, obvious reference to Hamlet.


Such fun!


Original review:
Part of my haul from Waterstone's in Dunfermline.

Slurp snort chortle pwaaaah! This is just so much fun! And sad! And zippy to read! But rich and complex at the same time! And I think I’ve used enough exclamation marks now!
Emphatically enjoyable. Admittedly, if I were to meet the hapless and hopeless narrator Charles Hythloday (how would you pronounce that?) then I would want to shake him. Hard. (The reaction of a mother.) He is outlandishly snobbish, self-centred, lazy, spends his time drinking and watching old movies, preferably those starring Gene Tierney, generally interfering in his sister’s love life and being blithely oblivious to the most obvious signs of chaos around him. But anyone who affords such a high rate of laughs per page and is so disarmingly honest and self-revealing will always earn sympathy, there’s the power of narration. And irritating as he is, there’s one person that I’d want to shake even harder, and that’s his dreadful mother. (The reaction of a daughter.)
Charles does mature. A bit. Too little, too late; that’s the sad part. And the complexity? Well, it’s perfectly possible to see this as more than merely the story of an individual family. Modern Ireland plays its part too. Very rewarding.

Astonishingly good - perhaps even better than its much-praised successor, Skippy Dies. Charles Hythloday is the cheerfully oblivious heir to a declining mansion outside Dublin; a modern Bertie Wooster, except not quite so oblivious as to be unaware of the barbarians at the gates. Except that Bertie and co. never had that distressing meeting with the bank. And so Charles, for all that he is perfectly aware "People don't get jobs to achieve things and learn values! They do it because they have to, and then use whatever's left over to buy themselves things that make them feel less bad about having jobs", is cast out into the cold. And for a book published in 2003, Murray is impressively prescient about the hollowness of the pseudo-boom, in Ireland more than anywhere. "The whole thing'll come crashing down...and all anyone'll have done is eaten a lot of expensive cheese." Yes, the lampooning of the slums and the bullshit pseudo-radical artists and the weasel words of commerce is a little heavy-handed at times, but only in the way that Hogarth or Scoop was heavy-handed, never in the way that makes one cringe at decent sentiments clumsily expressed. Excellent stuff.

Another compulsively readable novel from Paul Murray! As in n  Skippy Diesn, Murray pulls you in with comedy before surprising you with poignancy. This book, being more frequently humourous, doesn't have quite the emotional punch of Skippy Dies; the conflicts have lower stakes, though this isn't necessarily a bad thing—the darkness seeping into Charles's life doesn't have the oppressive grimness of the horrors affecting the characters in Skippy Dies. Indeed, the problems that Charles encounters, which might be minor conflicts for another protagonist, are given weight because of what we know about Charles's character.

This brings me to the novel's greatest strength: Charles Hythloday. Simultaneously self-unaware and a bit self-absorbed, Charles makes the perfect unreliable narrator, obsessed with imbuing his life and the people around him with literary meaning even when an objective reading of the situation would resist it. His desire to ignore ugliness and prettify the past and present drives his actions through the entire novel, and defines the question at its centre: What happens when we deny reality? Charles barricades himself in his crumbling family home (he leaves it in body but not in spirit, regarding its new inhabitants only as temporary invaders), cutting himself off from the pulse of life his sister longs for, and never truly connecting with people until they violently jolt him into it.

He's a fascinating character, likeable despite his absurd disconnection from the real world, his ignorance often equivocal: when is he truly blinkered and when is he shielding himself from pain? That ambiguity is what makes him so intriguing a narrator. Charles engages in self-examination only when he can control exactly what he finds, turning people into archetypes and objects into metaphors, arranging his life into linear narration. When he approaches the truth, he shapes it into something more pleasing and then looks the other way. His burying of the past is most obvious when he recalls the more troubling episodes of his childhood; while most of the story is told with a running commentary, the memories that most bewilder him are written as straight-forward recollections, as though they are too dark and confusing for even Charles to make sense of in any positive way.

Paul Murray's strong grasp on characterization also inspires the novel's greatest comedy. Murray has a knack for using unusual turns of phrase to make ordinary moments spectacularly funny, and these lines are bolstered by their uniqueness to the character delivering them. Charles's funny moments are moments that could only happen because of Charles, because of the way he views the world and the way he expresses himself. No other character in the novel would react with the same indignation to a postman "[sauntering] off whistling across the lawn, which is not meant to be walked on except by the peacocks". This is a perfect scene to showcase Charles: his protectiveness of his home, his belief that he lives a stylishly wealthy life (the peacocks, which Charles is supposed to care for, are neglected and mangy, but he forgets this when he's around someone he considers inferior), his ignorance of reality (the postman has just delivered more bills that Charles will ignore without a glance). Character is what gives An Evening of Long Goodbyes its biggest laughs as well as its deepest pathos.