Lanny is a gloriously idiosyncratic little boy, busy building dens, talking to trees, enchanting and baffling his parents; getting on with the endlessly interesting stuff of life in an “ordinary home-county place”, a rural village in commuting distance of London. We see him, and we miss him, through the eyes of his rapturously devoted mother, a father who can’t feel the same closeness, an ageing artist who cherishes Lanny’s buoyant creativity, and a whole company of local people whose voices rise and fall in an “English symphony”. We also watch Lanny from the perspective of Dead Papa Toothwort, an ancient spirit who stirs in the ground and has seen all life in this place.
Max Porter’s second novel is a fable, a collage, a dramatic chorus, a joyously stirred cauldron of words. It follows his startlingly original debut, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, the dark, comic, wild, beautiful prose-poem-novel that was a runaway success in 2015 and won the Dylan Thomas prize. Lanny is similarly remarkable for its simultaneous spareness and extravagance, and again it is a book full of love. It plays pretty close to the edge over which lie the fey and the kooky; anyone allergic to green men may need to take a deep breath. But Porter has no truck with cynicism and gets on, bravely, exuberantly, with rejuvenating our myths.
Dead Papa Toothwort is a genius loci with style and personality: chatting, snoozing, hungrily feeding on the life of the village while doing all the usual things like changing shape, appearing now flea-sized, now acre-wide. When Alexander Pope advised gardeners to “consult the genius of the place in all”, he wasn’t reckoning on inelegantly motley spirits like this, but Toothwort belongs to a big, branching family of England’s Pucks and wood sprites and river gods.
He is named after one of the oddest species of native wildflowers. The common toothwort is parasitic, growing on tree roots, feasting on other plants because it has no chlorophyll of its own. It is the kind of organism that makes us ask where one thing ends and another begins: might a whole ecosystem be counted as one life?
This small flower grows into a magical fusion of all the village’s plants and creatures and histories. With Toothwort as guide, we can “ride the smells” of dinnertime (“Jenny’s lasagne”, “Derek’s hotpot-for-one”) and listen to snatches of talk that curl in italics across the pages: about garden waste, dog walks, cancer scares, minibreaks. Toothwort savours these odds and ends of people’s lives as if they were the finest champagne.
Masterful things have been done with rural communities in a succession of recent novels, so that readers may find the air humming with memories of Melissa Harrison’s At Hawthorn Time, or Barney Norris’s demotic song of Salisbury Plain in Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain, or – especially – the thick, floating, incantatory music of Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13. If the material of modern country life in Lanny feels rather familiar, with its mix of enchantment and ordinariness, emotions flashing out from the creases of routine, Porter’s rendering of it is beguilingly singular, with a freedom and fabular confidence of its own.
What kind of rural Britain do we meet here? Predictably, when under pressure, the village shows its darker colours of intolerance and suspicion. Possessive old-timers close ranks against the “frightful, entitled young people” who come with their smart commuter cars: “you cannot simply buy a sense of belonging on your mobile phone”. Spiteful busybodies and self-satisfied arbiters rush to judgment of incomers they don’t like. Pete, the artist, the most generous and inventive of residents, has dared to live a little differently and is brutally chosen as a scapegoat. The novel flirts with the kinds of eeriness that might at a stroke plunge us into crime fiction territory.
There’s an excellent scene in which Pete scores a Biro grid across a postcard of an Eric Ravilious watercolour, obliterating the “lovely chuff-chuff train”, feeling his “whole hateful guilty life queued up ready to land on this poor image”. But his affection for the picture, and his understanding of it, remain strong even as he erases it. The novel won’t settle for any reflex iconoclasm. Voices of kindness and common feeling sound strongly in the polyphony. There’s old Peggy still standing at her gate, having seen the village filling “again and again like a rock pool”. Lanny and Toothwort are affirmative figures: fertile, resourceful, sometimes endangered but winning through.
It’s not as political commentary or state-of-the-nation study that Lanny speaks most forcefully. It’s the formal inventiveness that will stay in the mind, the shapes and pairings, the sudden eruptions of imagery. It’s the idea of Lanny’s DNA as a magic trail shimmering through back gardens and playrooms, or his mother’s dream of herself as a Renaissance painted madonna. Porter’s writing is poetically concentrated while also deploying a wonderfully common-or-garden kind of language, loved and used, rolling off the tongue.
He is a superb writer of children. The young boys in Grief Is the Thing With Feathers were acutely real in their energy and sadness, dive-bombing from the sofa, splattering the bathroom mirror, mocking their father as a way of showing their love. Lanny is different. Bemusing all who know him, he is given to sudden feats of disappearance that border on magic. A sappy bud to Toothwort’s ancient root system, a mythic child of nature, he is a junior St Francis more likely to turn up with a flock of birds than a football. Yet he’s also any child, an everychild, and the novel celebrates all children: their oddity, their outbursts of gnomic wisdom, their independent imaginative lives.
There are sections of Lanny that turn too wacky for me. I faltered at the seriously weird village hall performance that features Toothwort as a nightmare gameshow host who has found the keys to the props cupboard. But Porter is a writer who takes risks, and this is the way new things are made. One couldn’t ask him to rein in a strangeness that is so often triumphant. In a sequence of great power and compression, for example, a voice of human need rises from a deep hole and Toothwort becomes a sprouting orchard answering that need from above, growing fruits in his open hands and offering a “miracle harvest” into the dark.
Admirers of Grief Is the Thing With Feathers will recognise in the figure of Toothwort some of what was most gripping about the first book’s presiding force, Crow, the bird who visits grieving humans. Both have a chatty, pottering, intimate presence while also being giant and ungraspable. Both combine omniscient oversight and on-the-ground involvement, toughness and tenderness. With these strongly characterised spirits, Porter is telling stories that link the immediate crises of individual lives with ancient, ageless currents of feeling and experience. Lanny’s epigraph comes from Lynette Roberts’s poem “Green Madrigal (I)”:
Peace, my stranger is a tree
Growing naturally through all its
Discomforts, trials and emergencies
The novel, though short, is optimistically intent on evoking forms of growth that might capaciously accommodate all manner of personal trials and English emergencies, cumulatively making a kind of peace.
• Alexandra Harris’s Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies is published by Thames & Hudson. Lanny is published by Faber (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
