Shapeshifting

A chronicle of adolescent trauma

Diane Stubbings

Shy by Max Porter Faber $24.99 pb, 122 pp

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.

Porter crafts language that is not quite poetry, not quite prose, a spiky, vigorous lyricism that both encompasses and enacts Shy’s ruptured relationship with the world, all the ‘[l]ittle ideas left to grow unmanageable in the massive gabber hangar of his night terrors’. Words, in Porter’s hands, perform, their rhythm and visual effect as they fall on the page, as they stumble or race across its surface, as vital as their meaning. When Shy creeps through the darkness, Porter’s language creeps along with him. When Shy strides in step with the music pulsing from his Walkman, the language too pulses: ‘his spitty internal beatbox, / walking in time, / step by darkstep nod and step’.

The keystone of Porter’s writing is the natural world, its capacity to transform, even redeem. In Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015), a crow – an allusion to Ted Hughes’s crow poems –attends a family as they navigate their way through the anguish of death, while in Lanny (2019), the Green Man of English folklore presides over a moving tale of death and rebirth. In All of This Unreal Time (2021), Porter’s exquisite performance text that is almost the converse of Shy, a man finds atonement in the miracle of the living world.

Similarly, two crucial images denoting the spirit and potency of nature anchor Shy. The first is the ha-ha, the ditch that invisibly divides the estate’s gardens from its meadows and livestock fields. Within literary texts, the ha-ha traditionally operates as a metaphor for the abiding tension between tamed and untamed, cultivated and wild. It carries that same resonance here, but more fundamentally, Porter’s ha-ha amplifies the distortions of time –‘the chundering thunderstorm of again and again’ – upon which Shy depends.

These distortions create an other-worldliness that owes much to Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958), a book Shy recalls reading as a child. Time folds in on itself, a braiding of past and present actualised in the carvings of names and initials on the old beams of the house; in the ‘traumatised past’ of those previous occupants who linger still in the ghost stories the boys tell and the time-twisting nightmares that plague Shy’s dreams.

The other critical image is a pair of badgers that derail Shy’s mission. In folklore, badgers are depicted as tokens of good and bad fortune, even harbingers of death, but that doesn’t entirely account for the symbolic weight Porter affords them here. Porter’s intent might be traced to the English naturalist poet John Clare’s ‘The Badger’, a poem about the ‘sport’ of badger baiting, which intimates something of the friction between Shy and a Britain still disturbed by the aftershocks of Thatcherite social policy. Despite its ferocious resistance, Clare’s badger is ‘kicked and torn and beaten’ to death. Or there is Seamus Heaney’s ‘Badgers’ (1979), where the badgers ‘[nose] out what got mislaid / between the cradle and the explosion’, lines that correlate with Shy’s bewilderment as he struggles to compose from the fragments of his life a coherent narrative.

But meaning in Porter’s writing refuses to be pinned down: ‘The solid world dissolves, then coheres, like broken sleep.’ His novels are shapeshifters, their deftly modulated polyphony and their layered imagery prompting sense and significance to drift in and out of focus, an effect novelist George Saunders refers to as writing that ‘makes the world seem stranger and more dear (or more dear because stranger)’.

There are those who will resist the climax Porter composes for Shy, who will label as sentimental Porter’s refusal of tragedy, his attachment to hope. Others, like me, may feel a tremor of unexpected wonder. g

Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne. Her plays have been shortlisted for a number of Australian and international awards.