Shy concludes Max Porter’s informal trilogy of short, poetic novels powered by pain and polyphony. First, in 2015, came Grief is the Thing with Feathers, in which a widowed Ted Hughes scholar is both shocked and comforted by the arrival of a croaking, crouching crow. Then, four years later, Lanny, which followed a young boy through village life, with appearances by the ancient spirit of Dead Papa Toothwort, and explored issues of alienation and isolation. Both were works of multiple voices, not always human; and both introduced Porter as a writer meticulously interested in rhythm, compression and the profoundly generative process of conveying the intersection between individual consciousness and collective identity.
If those books were concerned with boyhood (Grief’s widower must also carry on being a parent to his small sons), then Shy catapults us into the angst of adolescence, accompanied by the heavy, heady sound of drum and bass, the obsession and release of its eponymous protagonist. Shy has messed up big time, and is currently on his last chance at the Last Chance, a residential school for violent, troubled boys on the cusp of young adulthood. Plugged into his Walkman (it is 1995; Shy uses the deodorant Lynx Africa and has recently crashed a Ford Escort), he resists the attentions of well-meaning teachers and therapists, spurns his grief-stricken mother’s and impatient stepfather’s exhortations to take control of his life, and tries to turn off the buzzing memories of all his misdemeanours.
As we meet Shy, there are hints that he is contemplating a more permanent way to escape the churn of his thoughts and actions. At 3 a.m, he creeps over the loose floorboards of the grand country house on which the Last Chance has a tenuous claim (‘This’ll be some posh twat’s kitchen next year,’ he thinks, of the plan to convert it into luxury flats), his rucksack filled with flintstones. Over the next few hours, his head continues to seethe with kaleidoscopic outtakes of his life so far, charting a journey from charming seaside home movie to less-than-charming encounters with sex, drugs and broken glass.
The novel’s historicity – the CK One whiffed on a pupil from a neighbouring private school in a fight; the Ninja Turtle Pez machine that belonged to the six-year-old Shy – yields to a fractured universality, as Porter sends his charge out into the countryside – the boy’s suspicion of the ‘weird tractory shithole’ that he’s ended up in another marker of difference from the happy-in-nature Lanny. The darkness, too, is a source of anxiety. Shy suffers from night terrors, ‘one dream un-waking into another’; and as he plods across the Last Chance’s picturesque ha-ha and ploughed fields, he is a creature at odds with both inner and outer landscapes. Language and typography fracture appropriately, unidentified animals cronk, ribber and crunkle in full Ted Hughes-mode, and Shy’s thoughts cluster into ‘a sour blankness’.
This snapshot of a story hinges on where Shy is going and what he will do when he gets there. But that sells short Porter’s exceptional ability to describe emotional distress and make it near-palpable to the reader. How is this done? It feels unfashionable, in a literary sense, to hazard the guess that it relies on sincerity; this is a novel that, for all its stylistic flourishes and experiments, one feels one’s way through. It may come down to whether you think an aggressive, ungrateful, surly young man’s life is worth saving, and whether you can tune in to his howl of pain. Porter is there to make sure that, at the very least, you don’t turn away.
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