Max Porter is taking me on a tour of his house that, because he is in Somerset and I am in Kilkenny, necessitates him picking up his laptop and angling it towards the collections that are his pride and joy. There are the tiny, beautifully detailed items of dolls’ house furniture; the pile of stones on his mantelpiece that forms the start of a miniature drystone walling project; and, primus inter pares, his array of Pez dispensers, his oldest and most treasured collection. “Every single one of them is chosen because I find it charming or beautiful,” he explains, “because you can buy bulkloads of them on the internet but you’ve got to fall in love.”
While he talks about his fondness for how the sweetie dispensers’ “rampant kitsch” combines with an impressive design quality and makes me laugh by describing how he paid one of his three sons hard cash to Blu-tack them all precisely to their display cabinet so that they didn’t tumble when the front door slammed, I’m struck by how helpful his passion for collecting and the objects of his zeal are in considering his novels.
Shy is the last of a trilogy that began with Grief is the Thing with Feathers, a Ted Hughes-inflected meditation on loss and how to survive it that was adapted into a mesmerising stage play by Enda Walsh, which starred Cillian Murphy as both a bereaved husband and father and the giant, deep-throated crow who embodied his distress. After Grief came Lanny, a joyous piece of pastoral writing in which a small boy navigates his way through life with Dead Papa Toothwort, an ancient forest spirit, always hovering in the wings.
Both novels – compressed, lyrical, fragmentary – are explorations of innocence and experience, of childhood and maturity and of the talismans, literal and metaphorical, we gather to us for the journey.
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Now, comes Shy, a howl of rage in book form. Its protagonist, the Shy of the title, is marooned at a country house, complete with obligatory ghost stories and a ha-ha in the garden, now repurposed as the “Last Chance” residential school for teenage boys with severe behavioural problems.
Shy himself has committed a string of serious offences, including smashing up his old school’s laboratory, trashing the house of some family friends trying to help him and, most damningly, wounding another boy with a broken beer bottle. He is, he reflects, “tethered to the last mistake, everyone waiting for the next one”.
We meet Shy as he prepares to abscond in the night, his rucksack crammed with flints, and follow him for the next three hours of his life as his head seethes with anger, sadness, regret and confusion and with the drum and bass music that he adores. His own thoughts and memories are punctuated by the voices of his mum and stepdad, his teachers and therapists and the documentary crew who are filming what are potentially the last days of the Last Chance – this being the 1990s, the house is threatened with refurbishment as luxury flats (“This’ll be some posh twat’s kitchen next year,” ponders Shy, as he prepares to take his leave).
“It’s quite a straightforward book,” Porter tells me, “but I’m getting these messages saying ‘Thanks, I feel like I’ve been walloped’, or ‘Thanks, I feel like someone’s pushed my head through a speaker’. Someone said, ‘I finished Shy, your best book yet. It absolutely f***ed me.” He laughs, as if unsure whether to be delighted at the visceral response to the novel, or apologetic that it’s having such an effect.
It’s impossible not to feel compassionate towards Shy, even when he’s behaving terribly, because of the skill with which Porter universalises his experiences: his desperate desire to rewind the clock after a violent outburst, his sense of isolation, and fury with those closest to him, his relentless self-sabotage. “I can’t bear writing about teenagers that seeks to diagnose or patronise them as it being part of the teenage thing,” Porter explains. “It’s the realest feelings human beings ever have; it’s the closest we ever get to bursting out of our skin and that should be something we are hugely interested in and celebrate, rather than just seek to turn the volume down and lock it up.”
The novel went through several fascinating iterations before it became the pared-down 20,000 words that now exist. Porter began by writing about a medieval manuscript illustrator and then, after a year of research, rewrote it with a Victorian setting. Both of these ghost-works will, he hopes, find expression in other projects and both focused on the “the kernel of resistance in oneself to the ways we’re encouraged to live”.
At one point, Shy’s mother had her own novella, before Porter realised that her story was told more effectively through brief appearances. It is, he says, his most edited book, with the writer doing his final work on it to a soundtrack at 170 beats per minute, “so that it actually moved and rolled and crouched and hopped like the music he’s listening to in his head. And that was really lovely, productive work because it was nothing to do with me. It was much more like being in a therapeutic relationship with Shy.”
We talk a little about our shared admiration of the work of Claire Keegan and her ability to strip back narrative to the essentials. When you’re in the hands of a writer like that, Porter notes, “your cynicism or self-awareness as a reader disappears because you’re like, ‘OK, the game is on. This is not mucking around.’”
Neither is Porter mucking around. Having left behind the Middle Ages and the 19th century, he has still managed to write a historical novel. Shy resonates with the cultural artefacts of the 1990s, its rave scene and lads’ mags and, more impressively, the decade’s feel of solipsistic swagger. It allowed him to tap into “that idea of the teenage boy as highly self-conscious artificial assemblage of different wannabe elements according to everyone else’s expectations. That felt like a historical investigation into the way that the 90s were so self-satisfied. We sort of thought we had the answers or we were winning, particularly in the UK, where we thought we were the hot cool scene and all that kind of cool Britannia stuff that is now so poisoned.”
Porter started his career as a bookseller and then became a publisher before concentrating on writing full time. In addition to the novels, he’s also written an elliptical, provocative work on the final days of the painter Francis Bacon which, he tells me with amusement, his hardcore fans regard as his best book.
His life as a writer is supplemented with numerous other activities, however, from his partnerships with other artists to his involvement in a wide range of mentorship and care programmes that have, he says, changed his life: “That work for me is everything and I honestly don’t think I could do this kind of getting on a train to X literary festival to talk about this if I didn’t have that fuel in my tank.”
It’s unsurprising, then, to hear that, as well as envisaging Shy as a portrait of an individual mind in chaos, he also sees it as “a love letter to people that work in progressive educational institutions and for whom the language of compassion is a futile weapon in this unwinnable war against pain and sadness. I hope it comes from a place of deep admiration but also humour.” The book is indeed at times very funny, especially as it accurately captures the hothouse atmosphere of young men competing for dominance by bragging about their savviness.
Above all, however, it thrums with the urgency of young lives – many of them compromised by far more difficult circumstances than those of Shy’s upbringing – about to founder on the rocks. I remark to Porter that even the help that’s available to the novel’s characters would likely not exist today, in an even bleaker and more precariously resourced environment. Does he feel the UK is in worse shape now than it was at the time he’s writing about?
He acknowledges that, given that our conversation is to appear in an Irish newspaper, “it will be crass to say it’s only recently become shameful: the history of shame and the British Empire are one and the same thing.” He is, however, increasingly worried and angered by “the absolute abandonment of any kind of moral compass in the British government”, and fears that “our children’s children will be unpicking this mess because the scale of the inequality and the greed is so severe”.
He also laments the stifling impact that, and the limitations on free movement in the wake of Brexit, have had on creators, artists and performers. His own track record in taking his work beyond the printed page is striking. Aside from the stage version of Grief is the Thing with Feathers are numerous collaborations, including another with Cillian Murphy on the 2021 film All of This Unreal Time and forthcoming Shy-related projects with musicians and DJs from Brussels to Cork to Galway.
He sees his three novels thus far, with their multiple voices, tones and registers, as a form of polyphonic inquiry and Shy as the conclusion in which the noisy, energetic text has reached “peak bombardment”. His next novel will be different in subject matter and style – though I suspect it will still be utterly, recognisably Porter. After all, he says, if there’s one thing he’s learned, “it’s that short novels about apparently small or upsetting things are OK. They’re acceptable to people.” More than acceptable, I would have said: received with positive gratitude.
