Village voices

Max Porter’s first book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015), got a lot of credit for finding original ways to talk about two of the oldest subjects under the sun: human love and human death. It’s hero is a young father writing a book about Ted Hughes, whose distress at the death of his wife, and whose efforts to look after their two children, are shaped by the appearance in his life of Hughes’s celebrated figure of the Crow, a real/metaphorical creature who is on the one hand disgusting, violent, abusive, anarchic and gloating, and on the other bracingly vigorous, unkillable and transformative. The bird’s dynamism blows apart familiar structures of narrative and prevents any one point of view from achieving a steady control. The book therefore becomes a collection of glimpses and fragments, some of which read as poetical eruptions, others of which deploy more logical procedures, and all of which gradually coalesce into the compelling portrait of a mind that is initially devastated by loss, but gradually learns to cope with it.