When we meet Shy, the antihero of Max Porter’s novella, it is the middle of the night and he is creeping out of a school for delinquent youths and heading towards a lake carrying a rucksack ominously filled with rocks. A teenager with a violent temper and a passion for drum’n’bass, Shy’s hellraising has left his mother broken-hearted, his stepfather baffled, and prompted a succession of schools to expel him. Now he is marooned at the aptly named Last Chance, a crumbling institution “in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere” which we learn is the subject of a documentary film. Tiptoeing out of his dorm room, Shy reflects on how he has “sprayed, snorted, smoked, sworn, stolen, cut, punched, run, jumped, crashed an Escort, smashed up a shop, trashed a house, broken a nose, stabbed his stepdad’s finger, but it’s been a while since he’s crept. Stressful work.”
Porter’s book takes the listener on a tour around Shy’s mind, where memories of family altercations and a failed and humiliating attempt at sex with his girlfriend are interwoven with snapshots of therapy sessions, the voiceover of the Last Chance documentary and his mother pleading with him to think about his future.
