He is ever-present ‘as a cyclical reliability, as part of the country curriculum’. This is his ‘English symphony’ – random fragments of thought and speech that sometimes flow across the book’s pages like music: ‘blocked drains’ ‘Dylan needs a dimmer switch on his temper’ ‘all pumped up and shiny like a greased pig’ ‘PlayStation’s bust’.ĭead Papa Toothwort has been in the village since before it began. He lives in the woods and fields and shape-shifts through the village feeding on its detritus, its small deaths, its sounds, smells and gossip. He is exactly what his name implies – a devouring, parasitic, root of the earth.

The first shock to the reader is meeting Dead Papa Toothwort as he ‘wakes from his standing nap an acre wide and scrapes off dream dregs of bitumen glistening thick with liquid globs of litter’. Porter, however, weaves magic and reality together so skilfully that the book will delight imaginative readers, although it may puzzle those who expect a conventional layout and a straightforward storyline. And there is a playful disordering of some lines of type plus, between sections 1 and 2, a strange scattering of small crosses across white pages. This is true of his main characters, who are named, but also of his unnamed villagers.

Max Porter is superbly able to capture the character of each of his people in brief passages where each is recognisable by their thoughts, words and concerns. Lanny is a wonderfully imaginative, innovative and unusual book and it is hard to write a conventional review of it without destroying the impact of its strange, often zany, nature. Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers, returns with a new novel, Lanny, that taps into an ageless flow of folklore, feelings, fears and superstitions. Tags: Dead Papa Toothwort/ Grief is the Thing with Feathers/ Lanny/ Max Porter

Novel by max porter