Since the publication of his remarkable debut Grief is the Thing with Feathers in 2015, Max Porter has justly earned wide critical acclaim for books that are small in page count but big on ambition, all written in his trademark style that marries the expressive powers of poetry and prose.
The titular protagonist of Porter’s fourth book, Shy, is a “disturbed” teenager who struggles to cope with the everyday trials of modern life, finding himself frequently overcome by fits of rage in which he commits acts of violence and destruction incomprehensible to everyone and especially himself. After slicing another teenager’s face open with a broken bottle and stabbing his stepfather in the finger, Shy is sent to the aptly named Last Chance school, an institution for boys too dangerous to be left in mainstream education and housed in a decaying 17th-century mansion.
The book opens with Shy trudging across a muddy field in the early hours of the morning, carrying a rucksack ominously filled with stones, an expertly rolled spliff and his trusty Walkman, with the rest of the plot emerging through a series of flashbacks. Music – specifically, drum and bass, garage and jungle – is all that keeps the ravages of Shy’s rage at bay, providing, not solace or escape exactly, but a kind of framework to structure his thoughts and feelings and so make the world bearable. Shy’s inner monologue is a collage of slogans, nursery rhymes and especially song lyrics. This monologue is intercut with, among other things, the voice-over of a documentary about the school and its imminent sale to a developer who plans to convert it into luxury apartments.
Books about troubled teenagers are rarely good; this one is sublime. Porter is a writer drawn to the challenge of finding forms of language best suited to conveying intense psychological and emotional states, from the extremities of grief depicted in his debut to The Death of Francis Bacon, in which the artist increasingly loses grip on the world around him, which becomes mixed up with memories, erotic fantasies and alternative realities that might be brought into being at the tip of a brush. In Shy, Porter turns his attention to the mental maelstrom of a character who, though undiagnosed, evidently struggles with depression, anger issues and autism or a related form of neurodiversity.
And what a miracle of language this book is. Porter belongs to a new generation of young writers, including Lucy Ellmann, Paul Kingsnorth and Eimear McBride, who have enthusiastically embraced the lessons of modernism, and especially the modernism of James Joyce – an influence obvious from a passing glance at a page of any one of their books.
In Shy, Porter incorporates different font types, sizes and spacings, scrambles the order of letters within words, jams words together into portmanteaux and invents new words whose very textures evoke meanings that no other word could. He is just as willing to eschew the humdrum business of conventional grammar and syntax, sloughing off extraneous prepositions, nouns and verbs should they get in the way of the most direct form of expression he can find.
Whilst in another writer’s hands such techniques might seem merely pretentious, they are precisely what allows Porter to conjure with such intensity the see-saw motion of Shy’s thoughts as they leap from one thing to the next, his momentary losses of reason and, above all, the rushing tempests of unmanageable feeling and desire. Porter seems never to set down a single sentence, paragraph or scene without asking if there might be a richer, stranger, more evocative way of doing things – and it is here that he ultimately proves more linguistically inventive than his modernist-inspired peers.
Startlingly beautiful it might be, but part of what makes Porter’s writing so thrilling is the way the poetic rubs up against the profane. Some of the most remarkable pieces of description in Shy are of the crudely bodily kind, from the nibbling of thumbskin to some wrangling with a condom in the aftermath of a failed sexual encounter. Meanwhile, to anyone who grew up in the England of the 1990s in which this work is set, the characters’ affected patois and choice slang have the ring of authenticity.
Even for a writer of Porter’s rare calibre, Shy is a stunning feat, a high-wire act in which he never once wavers. Neither Lanny nor The Death of Francis Bacon quite lived up to the magic of Grief is the Thing with Feathers, the folkloric oddness and curlicuing typography of the first more charmingly whimsical than profoundly moving, and the central conceit of the second – each episode introduced as an imagined artwork – at times becoming distractingly rather than compellingly clever. With Shy, Porter has not only equalled but surpassed the triumph of his debut. It is not too much to say that this is a perfect book.
