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There’s a village sixty miles outside London. It’s no different from many other villages in England: one pub, one church, red-brick cottages, council cottages and a few bigger houses dotted about. Voices rise up, as they might do anywhere, speaking of loving and needing and working and dying and walking the dogs.
This village belongs to the people who live in it and to the people who lived in it hundreds of years ago. It belongs to England’s mysterious past and its confounding present. But it also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, a figure schoolchildren used to draw green and leafy, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth.
Dead Papa Toothwort is awake. He is listening to this twenty-first-century village, to his English symphony. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, enchanting boy whose parents have recently made the village their home. Lanny.
Quote: Max Porter is on the school run. He bustles around the kitchen preparing lunches for his three boys, aged nine, seven and three, speaking in a hushed tone and taking the occasional nibble of a sandwich.
It can be really boring raising children. A form of loving drudgery, the novelist says. Yet the energy of young people enchants and inspires Porter. He looks forward to the afternoon moment when his boys burst into his home office; fighting over the computer, showing him their paintings, asking questions about the world he had never considered. They have a purity of purpose absent in adults.
"I think it’s something to do with insight, spiritual insight. Children haven't yet lost the true understanding of what the point of things is and the point of things is the weather, or the game you’re playing, or what you're about to eat," Porter says.
"Children tend to get on with it in a way that I find quite exciting as a writer, particularly when you’re trying to whittle away at a plot or dialogue to get at the most pertinent thing. Children quite often just provide it in the way they see the world."
It is an eccentric boy named Lanny who has recharged the anonymous English home county village, where he lives with his crime writer mother and asset manager father, in Porter's captivating second novel, Lanny. Lanny is “a child of the old times, a proper human child” - a dreamer, a wanderer, a mystery. He is curious, and a curiosity. He develops a special friendship with an ageing artist, Peter Blythe, who teaches him how to paint. They are both idiosyncratic, resolutely themselves, a point of difference to the mundane mediocrity of modern life. Together they find the magic in the everyday.
Porter first explored their relationship several years ago in a poem, a response to Operation YewTree, the British police investigation into sexual-abuse allegations against media personalities including Jimmy Savile. The possibility of a platonic, pedagogical relationship between an old man and a boy interested Porter, and he had a sense there was more to explore.
But Lanny has not only recharged the village, he has captured the interest of its longest resident, Dead Papa Toothwort, the timeless presence who is now keenly listening for Lanny's voice, "clear and true, the lovely sound of his favourite". This creature is a take on the enigmatic Green Man, whose leaf-laden face has permeated European religion, myth and folklore. Toothwort too "has been represented on keystones, decorative stencils, tattoos, the cricket club logo, he has been every English trinket and trash, moral for cash, mascot and curse. He has been in story form in every bedroom of every house of this place. He is in them like water. Animal, vegetable, mineral. They build new homes, cutting into his belt, and he pops up adapted, to scare and define. In this place he is as old as time." He is a self-conscious symbol of the function of myth, well aware of his folklorist celebrity (at one point he proudly takes a Fanta lid on a tour of the village).
Toothwort is comparable to the figure of Crow in Porter's acclaimed 2015 debut, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, the “friend, excuse, deus ex machina, joke, symptom, figment, spectre, crutch” who flies into the lives of a father and his two sons after the death of their wife and mother. Toothwort too is philosophical, darkly funny and shrewdly insightful, while also slouching along the line of the sinister as he watches Lanny's every move. He is not from the present, Porter says, but from English deep time. He is apolitical - the question of whether Britain leaves or remains may have taken hold of the country, but it means little to him.
"In England we have such a muddled and complicated relationship to myth at the moment, I wanted to write something that took this out of the present. He’s been watching this village since time began, so Brexit to him is just nothing. It’s just a tiny blip, not even a blip, just a thing to roll your eyes," Porter says.
"That was a beautiful escape for me from the highly charged extremism of opinion we are all living with at the moment. He felt like the person I wanted to talk things over with."
Porter has strong ties to Australia, where he will give an opening night address for the Sydney Writers' Festival in May. His father lived in Australia, Porter spent his gap year in the country and his brother-in-law lives in Sydney. I ask whether he has read the Miles Franklin Award-winning Randolph Stow's 1980 novel, The Girl Green as Elderflower , that also drew on English country folklore and a version of the Green Man? Hold on, Porter scrambles, I just want to write that down. It is no doubt not the first, or the last, of the green men he will meet.
"That’s the magical thing. It’s a bit like Crow. I have seven or eight notebooks full of my crow, other peoples crows, crows in different traditions. The fun you can have when you plug into something relatively ripe like that, there’s a lot of material around, and then you aren't hiding that knowledge. You let your reader know that he knows he is a device."
The slim novel flows between the consciousness of Lanny's mum and dad, Pete and Toothwort. An "English symphony" of sounds, sucked up by Toothwort, literally intersects the narration, gliding free form across the page and becoming louder as the novel continues. We are eavesdroppers, catching snitches of conversations and thoughts, half sentences such as "what next Polish adverts in the parish mag" or "backpacked around Asia and came back as much of a twat as when he left". This is the cacophony of Toothwort's village, "a tapestry of small abuses, fights and littering, lake-loads of unready chemicals piped into my water bed, green and decline, preaching teaching crying dying and walking the fucking dogs, breeding and needing and working."
As with Grief, Lanny is pared of plot, description and character; his prose slips into poetry; he plays with typography and layout. Porter enjoys a review of the novel as "whittled".
"All that white space is space for you to be in."
"It gets at the way there is a bigger thing for the reader that I've not needed to include. I've got it right down to the point that you’re just getting it. So much is taken out and that's for you to be there. For you to be walking around the village … All that white space is space for you to be in."
If the dead mother was the hollow at the heart of Grief, here it is Lanny who vanishes in the second part of Porter's novel. He is everywhere but nowhere; we see him from the points of view of others, but he remains as much a mystery to us as he does to his family and the other villagers. The formal experimentalism doesn't detract from a rocketing sense of momentum, or the empathy and emotional truth Porter generates.
"I finished Lanny and I gave it to my wife and I said, 'It's really different, it's like a proper novel, you wont’t believe how I have done plot' and she got just one sentence into it and said, ‘Okay it's very much by the same person’ , which I don’t mind. One of the things is the use of the mythical element and what that allows me to do with language and I am not in a hurry to get away from that. I find that really interesting and really generative."
Porter thinks of his autobiographically charged debut as an accident, written in secret in a few months when the former book seller was a senior editor at literary publishing house Granta (Porter has since quit and moved from South London to Bath). Lanny, he says, was a commitment to himself and those around him, that he was going to be a writer. Every Friday, he worked on his manuscript and discovered a lovesickness for the world he had created, a feeling he had long heard other authors describe.
"I've never had an affair but I imagine it's what an affair would feel like, totally consuming, irrationally so," he says.
Actor Rachel Weisz was also consumed by Lanny, and is set to produce and star in a film adaptation. Porter is not yet sure if he will be involved, as he has been with the transformation of Grief to a successful stage play. He has plans to write a new novel and a play and wants to build a literacy space in Bath. And then there are the sandwiches. He better get back to them.
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