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. 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 Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015), Lanny (2019) and The Death of Francis Bacon (2021), Shy occupies an interzone between fiction and poetry. Shy the character is “sensejumbled” so is Shy the novel. Shy ends in a dollop of pure sentiment: Seinfeld's no hugging rule is not followed here “The night,” for Shy, “is a shattered flicker-drag of these sensejumbled memories.” 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. Shy’s trip to the pond is also the story of his life. When the novel opens, Shy is sneaking out of school at 3am with a rucksack full of rocks on his back.

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”. First caution in 1992 aged thirteen.” He has alienated his mother. “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. T he year is 1995 and Shy is a 16-year-old boy toting an impressive CV of delinquencies.

Novel by max porter