Stylistically unorthodox, a little mystical, with a big heart and a small page count, the novels of Max Porter (the prize-winning author of Grief Is the Thing With Feathers) are one of the surprise success stories of modern literary publishing. True, even his most ardent fans may have balked at the nigh-on impenetrable experiment of his last book, The Death of Francis Bacon, but admirers of 2019’s Lanny, Porter’s fabulist state-of-England satire about a precocious boy of the same name, are on safer ground with his new novel, Shy, about another eponymous boy who might be Lanny’s unluckier cousin.
Shy, 15, lives at Last Chance, a rural institution for delinquent boys in the West Country, after being expelled from school (twice), cautioned at 13 and recently arrested. He has, among other things, “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”. We join him when he’s creeping out of Last Chance in the small hours, heading to a pond with a rucksack full of drum’n’bass tapes and, more ominously, rocks.
What follows, over 128 pages, is his jumble of night thoughts as Shy looks back on the turning points that brought him to where he is, as well as his interactions with staff and other boys at Last Chance. The narration unfolds as a kind of spectral swirl of voices in which assorted weights and sizes of type indicate different timelines. Vivid scenes erupt like lightning in fog, from Shy’s childhood anger at learning that Santa is actually his stepdad, to his slicing open another boy’s head with broken glass during a town-centre fracas in his teens.
