Lanny

Lanny is a wonderfully imaginative, innovative, and unusual book, and it is hard to write a conventional review of it without destroying the impact of its strange, often zany, nature. Max Porter is superbly able to capture the character of each of his people in brief passages where each is recognizable by their thoughts, words, and concerns. This is true of his main characters, who are named, but also of his un-named villagers. There is a playful disordering of some lines of type, and between the first and second sections, a strange scattering of small crosses across white pages. Porter, however, weaves magic and reality together so skilfully, the book will delight imaginative readers—although it may puzzle those who expect a conventional layout and a straightforward story-line.

The first shock to the reader is meeting Dead Papa Toothwort as he "wakes from his standing nap an acre wide and scrapes off dream dregs of bitumen glistening thick with liquid globs of litter." He is exactly what his name implies—a devouring, parasitic, root of the earth. He lives in the woods and fields and shape-shifts through the village, feeding on its detritus, its small deaths, its sounds, smells, and gossip. This is his "English symphony"—random fragments of thought and speech, which sometimes flow across the book's pages like music: "blocked drains," "Dylan needs a dimmer switch on his temper," "all pumped up and shiny like a greased pig," "PlayStation's bust"—

Dead Papa Toothwort has been in the village since before it began. He is ever-present "as a cyclical reliability, as part of the country curriculum." He is there in the Green Man carved in the village church: "grinning at the baptised and married, the bored and the dead, biting down on limewood belladonna." He is there at every summer fete, "amongst the folk who dress up as Toothwort." He haunts the villagers and frightens the children:

Say Your Prayers, and be Good Too.
Or Dead Papa Toothwort Is Coming For You.

And he has a special liking for the boy, Lanny. Which is dangerous, because every 100 years or so he feels "a tightening itch" that he can't resist and has to "put on a show," intervene, "change the nature of the place." The flow of italicized fragments of village talk across the pages becomes tangled, congested, overprinted, and confused as Dead Papa Toothwort's disturbance grows. And a terrible thing happens. Lanny goes missing.

Dead Papa Toothwort dominates the first section of the book, but we also meet Lanny, Lanny's Mum, Lanny's Dad, and Pete, an artist who was once famous and who now lives quietly in the village, working on small commissions. Pete has reluctantly agreed to teach Lanny about art, and they slowly form a story-telling, art-sharing friendship. For Pete "Lanny is good. Different, and bloody wonderful."

Lanny is different. He sings, "part song, part chant," disappears and reappears suddenly, does strange unpredictable things, empathizes too strongly with the world's ills, and has a strong affinity with nature. "Our little mystery," his mother calls him. His father notes that Lanny's school report says that Lanny "has a gift for social cohesion. He will often calm a fraught classroom with a single well-time joke or song." But Lanny puzzles and sometime irritates his father:

What, Lanny?

Which do you think is more patient, an idea or a hope?

I'm suddenly really annoyed. He's too old for shit like this. Or too young. It's fucking silly.

Go to sleep Lanny, and don't get out of bed. We'll talk about this in the morning.

I lie awake worrying, picturing my son lying on the cold grass whispering to a tree. Which do you think is more patient, an idea or a hope? What's wrong with him?

But for Dead Papa Toothwort, "The boy understands"—he is "Like me":

The boy knows me. He really truly knows me.

In the second part of the book, when Lanny is missing, we are gradually immersed in the emotional turmoil that pervades the village as the police arrive and conduct interviews and searches, and the media turn up looking for sensational stories. Hopes and fears, worries, gossip, loves, hatreds, bigotry, desire for notoriety, and suspicions fill the thoughts of family, friends, and villagers. No one is named, but we recognize Lanny's Mum, Dad, Pete, and Old Peggy (the village mystic), as well as pub gossipers, a pretentious neighbor who has long harbored grudges against Lanny's family as newcomers to the village, and others. Pete, who lives unconventionally and imagines a snooty neighbor googling him and discovering he "once filled a gallery with painted wooden dicks," becomes a scapegoat.

Tension builds throughout this section, and it is a relief when Old Peggy kneels in front of her ancient, carved, oak chest and whispers directly to Dead Papa Toothwort:

Look after him...

I know you.

I know what you're up to.

Give the boy back.

But Lanny remains missing.

Only in the final section of the book does the magic become seriously weird as Dead Papa Toothwort appears in a sort of game show to challenge and test Lanny's Dad, Old Pete, and Lanny's Mum. For me, this worked, and the final pages of the story are, maybe, as Old Peggy suggests:

False things, endings. Sustenance for fools and never what they claim to be.

Nevertheless...

She tells us of her vision of the future, and it is sad, funny, and satisfying, and we want to believe it.

Those who read and loved Max Porter's Grief is the Thing with Feathers will recognize something of his Crow in Dead Papa Toothwort, and will be attuned to Porter's imaginative story-telling. Lanny is a story that taps into an ageless flow of folk-lore, feelings, fears, and superstitions, and Porter tells it beautifully.

 

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