The year is 1995 and Shy is a 16-year-old boy toting an impressive CV of delinquencies. “He’s 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.” He’s been “expelled from two schools. First caution in 1992 aged thirteen.” He has alienated his mother. He loves only drum’n’bass and jungle. He is now a pupil at the Last Chance boarding school, described in a well-meaning documentary film as an “unconventional” institution for the rehabilitation of “some of the most disturbed and violent young offenders in the country”, and described by Shy as “a shite old mansion converted into a school for badly behaved boys in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere”.
When the novel opens, Shy is sneaking out of school at 3am with a rucksack full of rocks on his back. He is heading for the school duck pond. The rucksack will weigh him down. Last Chance indeed. Shy’s trip to the pond is also the story of his life. His inner monologue ducks and dives, summoning memories, smashing together disparate linguistic registers: family arguments, therapeutic exercises, the virtuoso improvs of drum’n’bass MCs, the macho nonsense of teenage boys. “The night,” for Shy, “is a shattered flicker-drag of these sensejumbled memories.”
Shy the character is “sensejumbled”; so is Shy the novel. But of course it is. It’s a Max Porter book. Like Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015), Lanny (2019) and The Death of Francis Bacon (2021), Shy occupies an interzone between fiction and poetry. It tells an essentially novelistic story using some of the tricks and tropes of modernist verse (and modernist fiction: that “sensejumbled” compound, for instance, sounds straight out of Joyce).
Like Porter’s first three books, Shy focuses on characters in extremis; like them, it is interested in questions of childhood and maturity, cruelty and compassion, art and despair. As the poetry of Ted Hughes came to the aid of the bereaved father in Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, so drum’n’bass and jungle come to Shy’s aid; as Lanny’s parents wrestled with the horror of his disappearance, so Shy wrestles with the tides and terrors of a depression he may have partly inherited – or so the book gently suggests – from his mother.
One of the interesting things about Porter’s work is that he uses the formal techniques of modernism not to shock the reader into assuming a greater critical distance from the text but rather to cultivate a deeper imaginative involvement in the lives of his characters. His books, for all their expressionistic idiosyncrasies, are hugely readable, even gripping (I flew through Shy in under two hours). This is not really a function of Porter’s linguistic brilliance; still less is it a function of plot, which Porter doesn’t bother with. In fact, Porter’s books offer an object lesson in the importance of loving your characters – compassion being one of the two secret ingredients of successful narrative art – and of allowing them to speak for themselves.
The substance of Shy is Shy’s inner turmoil; Porter conveys it beautifully (“His thoughts are loping along in odd repetitive chunks, running at him, stumbling”). He makes us feel not just Shy’s confusion but his mother’s and stepfather’s despair at ever reaching him. The method of the book is essentially choric: Shy’s streams of consciousness are fed by tributaries of other people’s language – his parents’ bribes and imprecations; the voiceover of the documentary film about Last Chance; the banter and bravado of Shy’s fellow pupils; the concern, love and impatience of Shy’s therapists and teachers. It is virtuoso.
It also feels, when you finish it, more than a tad sentimental. If compassion is one of the two secret ingredients of fiction, then the other is cruelty – or perhaps we might say, more gently, irony. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers worked so well because it leavened its deep reserves of compassion with the bitter black comedy of the character of Crow (“I find humans dull except in grief”). Lanny was at its best when it looked away from Lanny the endearing faery-child and sank deep into the ordinary spikiness of humdrum adult life. (In The Death of Francis Bacon, things went the other way: too much bitterness, not enough compassion.)
Without giving too much away, Shy ends in a dollop of pure sentiment. Seinfeld’s no hugging rule is not followed here. We might argue about whether or not such an ending has been earned; some readers will certainly feel that it channels sufficient emotive power to bring the book beautifully home. To my mind it doesn’t; there is, late on, an encounter with nature in the raw that is asked to bear slightly more thematic and narrative weight than it really warrants, and the book as a whole feels unbalanced in various ways. Shy’s mother and stepfather, for instance, remain merely spectral figures, which may be true to the subjective experience of depression – all the world can seem full of ghosts when you’re depressed – but leaves the book feeling thinner than it otherwise might.
At one point, young Shy dreams of playing Joseph in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Like Joseph’s coat, Shy has many patches: some of them are brilliantly coloured; a few – but only a few – are disappointingly bare.
• Shy by Max Porter is published by Faber (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
