Max Porter writes incredible things. They’re generally short, poetic, exquisitely executed tales of tragedy shot through with beauty.
Not an easy thing to do. Shy is brand new, and as enchanting as ever.
Shy is living at Last Chance, a home for ‘very disturbed young men’, and he isdetermined to escape it. But what is he escaping? As we get to know this young man through Porter’s pared back prose, we enter a messed up mind of warped perceptions capable of 30 seconds of joyous, cathartic violence followed by a lifetime of regret.
The beautiful, creepy, haunted old building that is home to Last Chance is about to be sold; a documentary on the boys and their carers is being filmed. Shy stays out of it, headphones on, drum and bass the only thing keeping him anchored in some sort of reality. He hatches a plan to leave behind the ghosts in the walls, the frail friendships, the scrapping, the rejected advances of his heartbroken mother.
Structurally, the story is told in the chaotic style of Shy’s mind. One-line paragraphs depict waiting to escape; he’s jumpy, his rucksack heavy. A memory of a happier time that turned to dust is described in dense text, a rush of thought climaxing in ruin. A night-time encounter, a city boy in the real dark for the first time; ‘It’s a different density of night by the pond.’ Deeply beautiful lines that describe Shy’s intense experience.
Shy is the story of a mind outside itself, unable to function rationally, to order the body to conduct itself how it knows it should. The story doesn’t offer any quick fixes or happy endings, but there is hope and there are soul-nourishing sentences penned by the hand of a master.
It’s incredible, brutal, crude, sad and absolutely stunning.
