Shapeshifting

In his preamble to a playlist for Faber Radio, Max Porter writes: ‘So much injustice but so much beauty, life is short and strange and I better run upstairs and tell these noisy little shits [my children] how much I love them.’ The quote would be an apt epigraph for Porter’s splendid new novel, Shy. The story of a troubled teen (Shy) who lives in a special education facility housed in a ‘shite old mansion … in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere’, Shy is a concise and compassionate piece of writing, one that reveals, within the ‘brambly and wild’ existence of a group of psychologically damaged boys, moments of spine-tingling transcendence.

One morning, just after three am, Shy stuffs his Walkman into his pocket, tugs on a backpack filled with rocks – a ‘shockingly heavy … bag of sorry’ – and sneaks out of his room. He makes his way through the ‘[u]ndark, anti-bright’ of night, crossing the ha-ha that separates the facility from the fields beyond. Were it not for the bag of rocks, we might presume that Shy is running away. But eventually, as he negotiates the terrain and as he lurches through the clutter and confusion of the past, we discover his purpose. He is on his way to a place that haunts his nightmares, ‘[d]eceptive, inky-smooth, silent, at ease with its unknown weight’.

First arrested when he was fifteen, Shy has ‘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 is harassed by people demanding that he explain why he acts as he does, but Shy has no explanation. Nor does Porter explicitly propose one. Rather, he situates us within the ‘flicker drag of … [Shy’s] sense-jumbled memories’, the ‘electrical storm’ that rumbles through Shy’s thoughts and precipitates his delinquency. Porter dares us, not to judge Shy, but to submerge ourselves fully in his experience. Shy’s rebellion, Porter suggests, is against a chronicle of trauma buried deep in his cells, a lifetime of hurt, misuse, and dysfunction that Shy struggles to name, let alone understand.