Lanny was one of my favourite books of the last few years. The Death of Francis Bacon confounded me almost completely (although it did inspire me to check out Bacon's artwork).
After such opposing reactions to his previous two books, I had no idea if I was going to like or understand what the hell was going on in this one.
Luckily, this one does have a clearly discernable narrative combined with Porter's inimitable style and therefore it's a definite on the success side.
Shy is a teenager living in a last chance boarding school for out of control youth. The book follows him one evening as he leaves the dorm and walks to a nearby pond carrying a rucksack full of stones.
We are let into all his most intimate thoughts and flashbacks to his life so far. We hear all the voices that have shaped him into what he is now.
Impossibly, considering how deeply unlikeable Shy would be if you were to meet him in real life, Porter manages to garner, if not full blown sympathy, an understanding and acceptance of why he is the way he is. By the end of the book I found I liked him despite myself.
It's written in Porter's usual choppy style with no regard for sentence structure or traditional narrative form. It bonces back and forward through his thoughts and experiences and feels like a more genuine stream of consciousness writing as a result.
Just because it's only 120 pages doesn't stop a book from hitting you right in the emotions and this does it in spades. It's a remarkable act of literary ventriloquism that dropped me completely in the head of a character far removed from my experience as I think is possible.
Max Porter is a genius and his writing is genuinely unique. His books have all been drastically different but all instantly recognisable as his writing. That's one hell of an achievement. I will continue to pick up his work as soon as I see it in the shops.
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