Max Porter, Shy

 

- Max Porter's previous novel Lanny was brilliant. (See my review here).

- Shy, his new one, is equally as good. Like Lanny, it's short (122 pages), and shimmers with dazzling prose. Over the course of a few hours during the night a young teen walks to a pond and reflects on all his memories, nightmares and fantasies that have characterised his broken life. He wants to end it. His voice is sparkling, jazzy, punchy and crude, and often whacky and confusing. I had to read this short book twice to clarify where it was going and what it was doing. But it well and truly paid off. ‘The night is a shattered flicker-drag of these sense-jumbled memories, like he’s dropped, but he’s stone-cold not, he’s just traipsing along..’ The typefaces change for the different times and voices he recalls.

- For a year or so he's been a resident at a reform school called the Last Chance, along with ‘…some of the most disturbed and violent young offenders in the country…he’s living in this shite old mansion converted into a school for badly behaved boys in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere.’ 

 - He stormed out of regular school after throwing a violent fit. He lived with his perplexed mother (her ‘snotty repetitive questions’) and his stepdad (‘fucking self-important twat’). He always felt isolated, alone and angry, and was rather obsessed with loud drum and bass music, metal and rap. ‘It promises and delivers’. That comforts him. One drunken night he smashed the furniture, glassware and windows of his godmother’s house. 

- The teachers and counselors at Last Chance are sympathetic and caring, and Shy, despite his often robust conversations with them, knows that. Now, as he's trudging through the night he reflects on his bad behaviour, and it pains him.

- At the end he wades into the muddy pond he was headed for, weighed down by a heavy backpack full of flintstones. But he re-thinks. 

- The novel's ending is emotional and hopeful and very satisfying.