A theme is beginning to emerge in the writing of Max Porter. The difficulties of the young – the troubled minds and dealing with difficult situations.A theme is beginning to emerge in the writing of Max Porter. The difficulties of the young – the troubled minds and dealing with difficult situations. The style, rather like the titles of his books, is becoming more and more compressed and insular. Young people are put in difficult situations; death of a mother in Grief is the thing with Feathers, being the only one who sees and feels the Green Man, Old Papa Toothwort, in Lanny, and here in Shy we go deeper into the life of a very troubled teen in the special home called ‘Last Chance’. I have deliberately left out The Death of Francis Bacon from that summary of Porter’s work. It doesn’t fit, it isn’t the same style or even the same size. My other three Porter books sit on the shelf together – same height and roughly the same thickness, but old Francis is shorter, thinner and doesn’t fit the pattern.
Shy really is a book for our times. It is an attempt to put onto paper and into words some of the sensations of those with troubled minds, mental illness and drug addictions. These are all problems that are growing exponentially in out societies but which we find hard, or uncomfortable, to talk about. Even here in New Zealand the government announced an extra $500million for mental health and addiction services. This will barely scratch the surface. All our buildings are outdated and not fit for purpose, and it will be years before new ones are even built, even though the money is available. The speed of planning and consenting is glacial at best. And all the time the staff who work there are leaving, because the conditions are so poor. No-one wants to work in terrible old buildings and who can blame them? How are people’s minds going to heal surrounded by such conditions? And that is just New Zealand. There will be similar and worse elsewhere. Porter really tries to paint a picture of Shy, our central character, and how his mind works; what troubles him in his everyday situations.
In Lanny, the old Green Man had some text that curled around the page, echoing the character’s twisted mind and challenging the dexterity of the reader. In Shy we have an enlarged font where a single line runs over two pages, forcing the reader to flick back and forth to follow each sentence. We run through bold, italic and indents to differentiate one line from another and create a sense of ‘dis-ease’ on the page. It is three in the morning and Shy is trying to break out of ‘Last Chance’. He has a rucksack full of rocks. Initially I didn’t know why, but perhaps I should have guessed at once. On page four we learn that this is 1996 and Shy has a Walkman. We are just before the age of the ubiquitous mobile phone. The voice of his therapist comes indented and in bold. She praises the progress they have made today and Shy unleashes his first volley of anxious vitriol as he creeps from the house:
He’s sprayed, snorted, smoked, sworn, stolen, cut, punched, run, jumped, crashed an Escort, smashed up a shop, trashed a house, broken a nose, stabbed his stepfather’s finger, but it’s been a while since he’s crept. Stressful work.
Although we are mostly looking at Shy, we do also see some of the others collected together inside the ‘Last Chance’:
They talk a lot. More than any of them ever have before. Sometimes with the teachers, unpacking what they have been through, what they’ve done, just chatting in lessons, or in little groups, sudden moments of honesty. Jamie told them about when he got his diagnosis aged thirteen and all his mates stopped talking to him. His best friend started calling him a retard. I won’t ever forgive that, said Jamie. Benny talked about his dad dying in prison. He almost cried and everyone was silent while he got his shit together because Benny is the toughest and nobody ever sees him cry. Paul talked about what he’d done and his time in borstal and how he’d lost his virginity when he was eleven and they didn’t feel easy making sex jokes around Paul after that, but Paul mostly stays in his room playing his SNES. They tell stories. Some bragging, some regret, some baffled grinning shrugs and ripples of easy laughter. They talk about how wrong school was for them. They try and figure each other out, because there’s fuck-all else to do. They each carry a private inner register of who is genuinely not OK, who is liable to go psycho, who is hard, who is a pussy, who is actually alright, and friendship seeps into the gaps of these false registers in unexpected ways, just as hatred does, just as terrible loneliness does.
I have ended up quoting the whole page there, because I love the easy way we roll from simple observations to pin-point depth about the whole situation. You can feel the emotion behind the words. You can feel the uneasy tension of a room full of boys.
As Shy lies in bed, these are some of the thoughts that are flowing through his head:
Amanda taught them about the Norns, the mystical Nordic sisters, sitting knitting futures, and that night Shy was woken by the weight of them as they sat at the foot of his bed, three ancient biddies, oddly familiar hybrids of Mum, Nana, Amanda, Thatcher, Mrs Hooper his playschool teacher, Pat Butcher, Jenny, Madge Bishop, women he’d known or seen or imagined, collaged together, risen from the smudgy mess of his subconscious, staring back at him, smiling, clck, clck, one of them’s knitting, clck, clck, fate being looped and strung as he falls back asleep.
Beautiful imagery, full of half-memories and half-remembered names and faces overlaid by the story from mythology, linking a past time with the present.
I was particularly struck by the expansiveness of this short book. The time frame is only a few short hours but it seems to swell and expand to feel like a whole lifetime and then back to the early hours of the morning. All in 120 pages. We eventually get back to Shy with his backpack of rocks, creeping out of the building and across the fields to a pond. All his senses are alive as he wades into the middle of the shallow lake. He kneels, so the water is up to his chin, but then he is distracted by two floating shapes and has to investigate what is in the water with him. Before we know it, he is out of the water and heading back to the house:
He smells of pond. Everything smells of pond. He feels like he could sniff his way into individual microbes, earthy worming growgreen liquid stink, newts and shoots, silty, fruity, and as he walks he gathers in the smell of dry leaves, crinkly things, brown oily smells, good rot, herby hydro deep woodlousey sticky mushroomy smells, things turning, things that go on smelling this way whether or not a wet teenager is here to smell them. He is all sense. He isn’t having any thoughts, he’s all smell and shadows and ruined trainers, a frighteningly awake sleep creature sloshing along.
And as his journey progresses, the structure of the narrative changes to suit the situation, becoming an inner narrative, a conversation with himself:
He could learn to speak this language: night-end. He could train his indoor pupils to permanently widen, to drink it in.
Strange dizzy wake-up. Untangling.
He breathes deeply and it’s clean digestible air. He feels it hitting his insides.
He asks himself the question Jenny always starts with:
What’s happening with Shy this week?
Well, I went down to the pond. There were these badgers and…umm, I’m heading back now. Back up to the house.
And how are you feeling about that? About the night?
Umm.
Take your time.
I feel kind of lonely. Bit embarrassed and sad, if I’m honest, Jenny. A bit scared.
Oh Shy, he says, in Jenny’s gentle voice. Bad luck.
I love the inventiveness of these passages, they are alive with detail and just as Shy is experiencing all his senses at once, so are we, through inventive language and brilliant imagery. This is a great read. Short enough to read in a single sitting, like the night it describes. Hauntingly satisfying....more
I absolutely love Max Porter’s first two books. This is more of a challenge. Francis Bacon is a “difficult” paintPick the bones out of that, reviewer.
I absolutely love Max Porter’s first two books. This is more of a challenge. Francis Bacon is a “difficult” painter, not always to everyone’s taste. This is a difficult book in the same way.
A 74 page prose poem, divided into seven paintings and a preparatory sketch. I can’t work out of there is some deeper meaning hidden within the chapter headings – do they for example refer to actual pieces of Bacon’s art? Preparatory Sketch Non-existent, pencil on paper 6 x 4 in. One Oil on canvass 60 x 46 ½ in. Two Oil on canvass 65 ½ x 56 in. Three Oil on canvass 65 x 56 in. Four Oil on canvass 14 x 12 in. Five Oil on canvass 78 x 58 in. Six Oil on canvass 37 x 29 in. Seven Oil on canvass 77 x 52 in.
Has this slim book reduced his life to a series of canvasses? In the ‘Preparatory Sketch’ there is a question, “Did I draw this?” Then “Promise me you’ll hide this.” And finally: “Madrid. Unfinished. Man Dying.” In the following chapters there are recurring features and phrases, such as “Take a seat why don’t you.” And another, in Spanish, ‘Intenta descansar.’ Try to get some rest. The words spoken in the Madrid hospital where Bacon died at the age of 82.
My problem with the book is that really you have to go looking for other information in order to be able to make sense of what is happening, Yes we are seeing the aged Francis Bacon, silk in the hospital in Madrid. We have very brief snippets of conversation between Francis and his younger sister. But we have very few firm places where we can safely moor our understanding,
Are these references to pieces of his art? I just don’t know, episodes throughout his life perhaps? Lovers, arguments, drinking with cronies in old Soho bars.
Some of the book feels like Bacon addressing the paintings in his mind. “I’m going to tip you forwards out of the frame and whip your buttocks with lead white to give a sense of fight.”
It is the last chapter, the death chapter, that seems to make more sense than the others. Phrases like: “Immaculate studio. Not much money. Six hundred paintings. Messy studio. Plenty of money.” That links me to a photo of Bacon sitting in his studio, surrounded by mess, and paint on every visible surface. When I see him, I see that messy studio.
And another fine piece from the final oil on canvass: “Cut into the scene a suave tight-fitting Ganymede clutching a brush, with a bit of rough on his arm, stubble, musty, holds a cig like a shiv, scabbed knuckles, nicked a silver plate from the club, nipped to the bogs, came back pink and grinning, perky pig, truffle hunter to the bar, to the bar! Kneel like Mars to kiss the Venus in high heels’ chipolata toes and snaffle a fallen Dunhill. Abrazo! Last night on earth.
This is all more poetic, more expressive, and for me has more a sense of what is going on. And then this piece, which I also love: “Into a canvass coffin… … and in he went, grinning stupidly. The last light. Famous painters’ last rights.
In went turps. In went cadmium powder, bloody mess, rags, two dozen unclean brushes, a comb, tins, jars, a hundred Windsor’s, a hundred newtons, flannels, letrasets, an empty bottle of Krug, three Hundred quid in a greasy roll, a lighter, and then they…
Pissed in the box.
Spat in the box.
Spunk, champagne, linseed oil, mixed in the mind. Dashed, tooth-brush smeared and splashed in the box.”
Only then does it all come together, get real, has meaning, feelings and emotions, and this is the part that makes some sense. ...more
This ranks up there with the best books I have ever read. The ending is so full of tension that it made me miss whole paragraphs in my anxiety to findThis ranks up there with the best books I have ever read. The ending is so full of tension that it made me miss whole paragraphs in my anxiety to find out what had happened. I had to go back and read some parts a second time. When people say ‘it left me breathless’ it is almost always a cliché. With Lanny it was a physical symptom, breathlessness, heart palpitations, shaking. It really was that good. Not everyone will think that. It will not speak to everyone, but it spoke to me. It whispered and it shouted and I loved every minute of it.
Lanny is full of mythology and folklore. At the centre are two characters, a little boy called Lanny and Dead Papa Toothwort, the modern-day embodiment of the Green Man, the forest dwelling wildman of ghost stories and ways to frighten children to bed. The little boy is exceptional; creative, magical and sometimes terrifying in his ability to vanish from right next to his parents. He collects shells and rocks, moss and sticks, and anything that interests him, takes it home and labels it, writes stories and little books of spells and chants. In this way Lanny comes to the attention of Dead Papa Toothwort.
I love the way that Max Porter has recreated this figure of mediaeval myth. He is no longer out there living in the woods, he in the drains, the electricity and the bathwater, in the beer pumps at the pub, the school books and the church bell. He “divides and reassembles, coughs up a plastic pot and a petrified condom”. Not so much a being as a presence, a smell on the wind or breath in the air. This is the Green Man re-imagined for the 21st Century, with all its technologies and Marvel movies.
Little Lanny is so creative that his parents allow him to have art lessons with Pete, Mad Pete people call him, local artist, celebrity artist even, with a studio full of sculptures of reassembled bird skeletons covered in gold leaf. The two form a bond, a recognition of each other’s otherness. You can feel the happiness of the family and their life in the village.
All this is beautifully written. Stunning descriptions, such as a village hall as Lanny’s Mum “breaths in the cold stale air of the hall, all the christenings and eighteenths and retirements and jubilees and anniversaries; the wakes, the parent and toddler mornings. She breathes in the fresh particles of generations of villagers before her and it tastes like mould and wet tweed.” It is inventive too. Dead Papa Toothwort listens to the village, rather like listening to the village in Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. It speaks to him, but the lines are muddled together, sprawling across the pages in lines that snake and curve and flow outside the margins of the pages. These become so confused that eventually some are printed over the top of others, blurring what is said. Unique, perhaps. I have certainly never seen it before.
There are three sections to the book, and once you turn the pages into the second section, the whole book changes. I don’t want to say too much about what happens in that second half, in case I spoil anyone’s enjoyment.
I’ll leave you with a hint from Dead Papa Toothwort: “He whistlers his song, and the song is a set of private instructions… He has done this before but never with such sincerity. He means this terrible thing. He’s meant it forever. He makes a once-in-a-century effort, whistling his dream into being, setting the village up for its big moment. By the time he gets to the edge of the woods he has crumpled into nothing more than a whiff or a suggestion, he is only silent warm crepuscular danger, and the badgers and the owls have seen this before, and they know not to greet him.”
Spoiler alert: here is a little more if you need it.
(view spoiler)[ In the second half of the book Lanny disappears. He has done it before, but this time it is for days. Mad Pete is questioned by the police, accused of being a paedophile, and the whole village is out searching. Pages and pages are filled with comments, every different perspective is explored and articulated. Business is booming in the pub. People are skeptical about Lanny’s father Robert and his flash car. Even more skeptical about his mother Jolie and her abilities as a mother. She must be the most bankable crime writer with a novel waiting to be published.
And then we move into a dream sequence. People might think this is the weakest part of the book, moving too far from what might be real. But no, in many ways it is the best. Dead Papa Toothwort brings them to the village hall and puts on a show, a test first for Pete, then Robert and finally Jolie. Pete passes, Robert fails and it is all down to Jolie. Gradually Toothwort leads her to the bower that Lanny built, and finally to the deep concrete drain out in the woods. He shows her the fall inside, lets her hear the calling and the sobbing, and then we are out there rushing towards the place. Is he alive, has it been too many days without food or water?
And the final narration, nosy old Peggy who died watching from her cottage gate, and sees into the future to give us a longer sense of ending. “He has tried to lose the memory of Dead Papa Toothwort. Like the last speaker of any language he had had to forget in order to survive, but some knowledge of it lives in his marrow.” (hide spoiler)]
This short book is extraordinary. It is moving and it is funny and it is sad, but above all it is brilliant.
It is hard to know exactly where to place This short book is extraordinary. It is moving and it is funny and it is sad, but above all it is brilliant.
It is hard to know exactly where to place this book in a genre or a category. It is both poetic and fanciful, memoir and history. A family, a father and two sons lose their wife and mother. The grief and the way they cope with this is through a large black crow that comes to stay and help them through. They interact with the crow and it talks to them, tells them things and sometimes protects them too. Most of all it plays mind games with them and with us. Somewhere in the middle of all that is a father who is struggling with the loss of the woman he loves while at the same time trying to be strong for his boys. He has been trying to write about Ted Hughes, who published a volume of poems called "Crow" in 1970, after the death of his wife Sylvia Plath in the early 1960s.
Talking about his wife and their love, the father comes out with this amazing paragraph "I remember being scared that something must, surely, go wrong, if we were this happy, her and me, in the early days, when our love was settling into the shape of our lives like cake mixture reaching the corners of the tin as is swells and bakes." The tone and the style are easy but inspiring, they help move your brain towards creative things. I wonder what will come next for this incredibly talented writer? ...more
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