Paul Fulcher's Reviews > Shy

Idiot drama with no audience. Overthinking overlapping voiceovers.

We made such good progress today, Shy. I’m really delighted.

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 stepdad’s finger, but it’s been a while since he’s crept. Stressful work.

Psychologically disturbed juveniles requiring special educational treatment, or a bunch of teenage criminals on a taxpayer-funded countryside retreat?

Shy is the third in a loose triptych of novels with Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny, and likely the last of this style of novels for Porter as he explained to Waterstones Waterstones:

I suppose I am at a point in my career where my preoccupation about how to get inside the minds of others and how to use multiple voices to create a living collaborative thing on the page for the reader needed to reach its peak and has sort of reached its peak with this book. I think I am moving onto something different next time with my novels.

The 'sort of' in that quote rather key as this is a less distinctive and successful work that it's predecessors, so perhaps Porter has exhausted rather than conquered the style of work. The book also lacks the harder edge of both Grief Is... and Lanny, but I suspect deliberately so as in the same interview Porter talks of the lack of empathy in modern politics, and it's no coincidence I suspect that the novel is set in 1995, with a General Election looming, with battlelines being drawn up between John Major's "Society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less" and Tony Blair's "Tough on Crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime."

The magical side of the previous works is still here - ghosts, the League-of-Gentlemenesque Papa Toothwort replaced by Harry Hill's badgers, and a clairvoyant teacher who already knows the next election will be in 1997.

I was though delighted to see Porter keep to the perfect length of his novels and that, reacting to an Anthony Cummins review in the Guardian that suggested he ought to write longer books, respond in Esquire:

"I just don’t buy that, really,” he says. What the novella does, he believes is “get you thinking longer than some novels of triple, quadruple the length do. If you’re wanting a bit more from those characters, or wanting more sense of what might happen, that’s good. I think that means it might be a book you think about a little bit after you’ve turned the last page.”

Well said - and I look forward to what comes next from this fascinating author.

Shy by Dall-E: