Andrew Motion

Village voices

Max Porter’s second novel adds a social dimension lacking in his impressive first book

Max Porter’s first book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015), got a lot of credit for finding original ways to talk about two of the oldest subjects under the sun: human love and human death. It’s hero is a young father writing a book about Ted Hughes, whose distress at the death of his wife, and whose efforts to look after their two children, are shaped by the appearance in his life of Hughes’s celebrated figure of the Crow, a real/metaphorical creature who is on the one hand disgusting, violent, abusive, anarchic and gloating, and on the other bracingly vigorous, unkillable and transformative. The bird’s dynamism blows apart familiar structures of narrative and prevents any one point of view from achieving a steady control. The book therefore becomes a collection of glimpses and fragments, some of which read as poetical eruptions, others of which deploy more logical procedures, and all of which gradually coalesce into the compelling portrait of a mind that is initially devastated by loss, but gradually learns to cope with it.

Lanny, Porter’s new novel, uses many of the same techniques as its predecessor. There is the same separation of voices; the same reliance on a childlike point of view; the same interest in a supercharged language which makes sense without quite spelling an exact proposition; the same use of violent and disgusting things (‘the lovely dirt of public spaces’) to express the troubled depths of the human psyche; and the same interest in metaphors that combine realistic observation with surreal fantasy.

Lanny addresses a similar set of themes too: the flow of deep time that underlies the turbulence of the present; the darkness that lurks behind friendly faces; the contiguity of life and death. What is different, this time round, is the larger social dimension Porter gives to these things — and it is this, more than anything else, that not only prevents the new book from seeming like a recasting of the first, but an impressive step beyond it.

The Crow-role in Lanny is taken by Dead Papa Toothwort, the Green Man-ish place-spirit of a small village (‘fewer than 50 redbrick cottages’) within commuting distance of London.

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