Bad boy on the run: Shy, by Max Porter, reviewed

Shy concludes Max Porter’s informal trilogy of short, poetic novels powered by pain and polyphony. First, in 2015, came Grief is the Thing with Feathers, in which a widowed Ted Hughes scholar is both shocked and comforted by the arrival of a croaking, crouching crow. Then, four years later, Lanny, which followed a young boy through village life, with appearances by the ancient spirit of Dead Papa Toothwort, and explored issues of alienation and isolation. Both were works of multiple voices, not always human; and both introduced Porter as a writer meticulously interested in rhythm, compression and the profoundly generative process of conveying the intersection between individual consciousness and collective identity.

If those books were concerned with boyhood (Grief’s widower must also carry on being a parent to his small sons), then Shy catapults us into the angst of adolescence, accompanied by the heavy, heady sound of drum and bass, the obsession and release of its eponymous protagonist. Shy has messed up big time, and is currently on his last chance at the Last Chance, a residential school for violent, troubled boys on the cusp of young adulthood. Plugged into his Walkman (it is 1995; Shy uses the deodorant Lynx Africa and has recently crashed a Ford Escort), he resists the attentions of well-meaning teachers and therapists, spurns his grief-stricken mother’s and impatient stepfather’s exhortations to take control of his life, and tries to turn off the buzzing memories of all his misdemeanours.

As we meet Shy, there are hints that he is contemplating a more permanent way to escape the churn of his thoughts and actions. At 3 a.m, he creeps over the loose floorboards of the grand country house on which the Last Chance has a tenuous claim (‘This’ll be some posh twat’s kitchen next year,’ he thinks, of the plan to convert it into luxury flats), his rucksack filled with flintstones.