Max Porter blurs the line between dream and reality in his compelling, inventive fiction
The natural world comes alive in the wild and willful imagination of British novelist Max Porter.
In his powerful and poetic first novel, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, a talking crow helps a bereaved husband and his two young sons through the process of mourning. In his very affecting second novel, Lanny, a mysterious folkloric figure haunts a contemporary English village in which an unusual young boy goes missing, testing the values of the community.
Concluding this fictional trilogy, Porter's latest novel, Shy, again focuses on a young person — and gets at the heart of human experience in a direct and authentic way. In this intense story, a disturbed teenager's nighttime escape from the Last Chance school for troubled youth leads him to an unexpected, transformative experience in the woods.
Porter is also the author of The Death of Francis Bacon, inspired by the provocative English artist, set during his last days in Madrid.
Born in 1981 in High Wycombe, England, Max Porter lives in Bath with his wife and three sons. He spoke to Eleanor Wachtel from the Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway, Ireland.
Inspired by the woods
"I think I locate a good deal of my spirituality in the woods. I would say I almost have a religious relationship with trees and woodland, but also the woodland as a site of storytelling. For me, it's where myths and fables originate from, and it's where I had some of my most memorable or surprising or uncanny encounters as a child. So I think I kind of always return to the woods. You know, figuratively and literally and as a literary device to find meaning.
It's where myths and fables originate from, and it's where I had some of my most memorable or surprising or uncanny encounters as a child.- Max Porter
"I find that the current scientific discoveries about the relationship between living things in this world, things like the wood-wide web as discoveries that confirm what Indigenous cultures already knew, which is that this incredibly sophisticated template for how to live, for communication, because their roots can communicate with each other, which is kind of astonishing."
Discovering Shy
"I'd had this strange encounter in what I believe to be a haunted piece of woodland and then I had a dream about this boy and suddenly Shy was just absolutely alive in my head.
I saw very clearly this boy and he was see-through, he was standing in the woods and he was simultaneously what was behind him and what was in front of him.- Max Porter
"I saw very clearly this boy and he was see-through, he was standing in the woods and he was simultaneously what was behind him and what was in front of him. He had the past and the present just flowing through him and he was standing with his arms open and I thought of him as being accidentally able to hear momentarily what the animals were thinking, what the earth would have been thinking 30 to 40 thousand years before him, and what it might think that distance into the future as well."
Society's problem
"We've got more billionaires than ever, but we've got children and nurses and single parents eating out of food banks on a scale unimaginable even four or five years ago and poverty not seen since Victorian times.
"As well as a complete collapse of our infrastructure, everybody's on strike in the U.K. and of course the victims of this aren't the bankers or the politicians. They are the children and the vulnerable.
The person smoking in the bus stop who is spitting and cursing and vandalizing the bus shelter is deemed to be society's problem and often the light of literary fiction isn't shone upon that person.- Max Porter
"So I wanted to write about someone in trouble and who has made mistakes, but also who feels very blocked in, very in a cul-de-sac and I wanted to write about them notionally as society's problem.
"The person smoking in the bus stop who is spitting and cursing and vandalizing the bus shelter is deemed to be society's problem and often the light of literary fiction isn't shone upon that person. So I wanted to do that. I wanted to dial into that person."
Wrestling with himself
"What's up with this kid? That's the one question I don't have an answer for. Well, he's a weapon, right? If I were to speak freely as me about him — he is a white supremacist and clueless beneficiary. He is the spoilt, lost, baffled product of this inequality of a society tilted in his favour and not in the favour of other people born in different circumstances to him, and that sickens him as much as others.
I think the point is that nobody can reach him, least of all himself, and that's where the mystical element of the book comes in.- Max Porter
"But I think the fact that there is no real answer and there is no direct cause and effect, it makes him a more compelling and more troubling proposition — but also locks him in even more. Because if it was just a question of giving Shy some pills or getting Shy to apologize to the person he hurt three months ago, then it will be a very boring and I think very unrealistic project.
"I think the point is that nobody can reach him, least of all himself, and that's where the mystical element of the book comes in. Because perhaps there is something beyond the human realm that can at least, not save him, certainly not cure him, not even deliver him from his agonies, but connect with him, meet him, greet him in the night."
Inhabiting the character
"I just thought what a terrible and fraudulent thing it would be if I wrote him from the position of a 42-year-old male novelist and projected onto him. I had to cut and cut and cut myself out of this book really strenuously.
It's just Shy as represented both in his own mind, in his warring selfhood, in the cacophony of his attempts to even just find some peace or some stability in his own thoughts,- Max Porter
"It's just Shy as represented both in his own mind, in his warring selfhood, in the cacophony of his attempts to even just find some peace or some stability in his own thoughts, but also in the bombardment of other people's sense of him.
"And that felt so much truer to me, both in my memories of being a teenager but also in raising kids, also speaking to other people about how they feel. That stalemate between who people think he is and want him to be and who he feels himself to be is sort of pre-linguistic. It's so much an emotional state rather than something you can verbalize."
Mundane miracles
"My decision in this book, having gone through a kind of all-out otherworldly game show ending with Lanny, was actually to keep it pretty light and happening in such a way that if you were there, you might not even notice it had happened. I'm very interested in the everyday miracle.
"However you rationalize them after they've happened, they strike me as ordinary miracles, spectacularly, magically significant in the grand weaving of our life, but at the time it's just a little thing.
"There's no great grand visitation from a spaceship or any of those things that he fantasizes about. It's just a small change in his mind, maybe from being scared, maybe from being cold or from being in a highly vulnerable depressive state, maybe from being really stoned.
"But again it's not part of our therapeutic or diagnostic attempt to understand Shy. It happens to him and for whatever reason, it changes his path — or for this night at least, it changes his path.
"I didn't want it to be a huge spectacular thing. It's nice that it's interpreted as mystical, but I also think it's very everyday — very, very normal. And I just hope to be alert to those things in my life and other people's lives being of huge significance."
Max Porter's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
