I seem to recall I made some pronouncement (an observation rather than a criticism) somewhere back in 2016 about how much I struggled with this...
Not with the book, though I was so slow to realise that Grief is the Thing With Feathers was a novel and not a memoir, that it took hearing Max Porter talk about the book at Port Eliot Festival for the penny to drop. I had an odd few days afterwards trying to square it all in my head...no it was the paperback cover that I had a bit of an issue with.
Whilst fully understanding the need to make a book leap off the sales table and into someone's hands, and to make the most of the accolades it has received makes perfect commercial sense, but the cover in this case turned Max Porter's first novel, Grief is the Thing With Feathers, into a mountain of insurmountable unattainable brilliance in my mind giving it a very high fence to jump. I can only apologise because 'hoisted by my own petard' I realise I'm not exactly backward in coming forward about the odd book or two that I love on here either, and brace because I'm about to do it again.
Lanny has a cover so simple and unadorned and yet so complex once I had finished the book, that I have invested more time interpreting its meaning than can be good for me, none of which I can share without spoiling the book for anyone who might read it. Add in the lichen encrusted end papers enclosing the whole and my imagination was off on a frolic of its own with the significance. Maybe this is all just a blank canvas for the paperback and the paeons of praise that I suspect are about to be heaped on Lanny published this week by Faber.
On the surface Lanny is the story of a young, middle-class couple and their son who move to a village about an hour's commute from London; she a crime thriller writer, he something in finance and their young and unusual child Lanny...
'You seem to me a child of the old times, a proper human child...'
One of those villages that transport has made accessible for the city worker, and with it comes the merging of the old and the new, the past and the present in a rural setting What quickly becomes apparent is that other forces are at work, subverting any notions of the rural idyll, because Dead Papa Toothwort 'has woken from his slumber in the woods' and he is listening to them all, but especially to Lanny, the child in tune with the natural world.
Think Green Man...here's the last one we saw a few years ago at Buckland Abbey...
The Green Man much in evidence here in the South West with carved heads in churches various; heads and mouths surrounded by leaves and connections made with death, rebirth and life, and I am very grateful to Douglas of DevonChurchLand (Instagram) who willingly shared some of his green man church roof bosses from around the Shire to post here...
I think you might agree not altogether benevolent or comforting. Throw in some May Day relevance and fertility rites, along with themes of spring and resurrection, and I think that's just about every base covered for an enigmatic and uncertain spirit being emanating from the woodland. By way of further explanation, Charles Causley wrote Green Man in The Garden, a quietly powerful poem on the subject, and with a presence that segues well with events in Lanny...
Green man in the garden
Staring from the tree,
Why do you look so long and hard
Through the pane at me?
Your eyes are dark as holly,
Of sycamore your horns,
Your bones are made of elder-branch,
Your teeth are made of thorns.
Your hat is made of ivy-leaf,
Of bark your dancing shoes,
And evergreen and green and green
Your jacket and shirt and trews.
"Leave your house and leave your land
And throw away the key,
And never look behind," he creaked,
"And come and live with me."
I bolted up the window,
I bolted up the door,
I drew the blind that I should find
The green man never more.
But when I softly turned the stair
As I went up to bed,
I saw the green man standing there.
"Sleep well, my friend," he said.
The all-seeing, all-knowing Dead Papa Toothwort doesn't miss a trick, and this is where Max Porter's book goes strangely yet brilliantly off-piste as the disconnected overheard words of the villagers float across the page.
Now I'll own up that I often sigh at this sort of thing...
A bit of an attention-seeking conceit perhaps as the eye wanders away from the lines and has to catch these airborne drifts of words. But in Lanny's case it works like a dream because it's up to the canny reader (who definitely doesn't want to miss the gossip) to pin the words down, work out who might have said what and about who. It's eavesdropping par excellence, and once I had gone with the flow these, along with a series of untethered, unattributed conversations (about a serious incident), became one of my favourite aspects of the book. I was reminded, in the best possible way, of Alice Oswald's poem The Village (Falling Awake) where the poet hears those voices too.
Themes of the loosening grip of rural life, tradition and folk-lore versus the newbies predominate, and if the book started out very Alice Oswald in my mind it soon morphed into Ted Hughes's Wodwo... the half-man half animal creature, woken from its hibernation and on the prowl.
Moving to the village has not been as straightforward as Lanny's parents imagined and I really don't want to say anymore because the cover info gives very little away and with good reason. Lanny needs to be left to spring its own surprises, which it most certainly does. The writing is unique, the rhythm often poetic (read it aloud) the plot compelling, driving on towards a denouement that left me with a seriously pounding heart and requiring the occasional reminder to breath.
In the end I took Lanny up to the woods with me because it seemed like a book that needed to be thirled, as in 'bound with ties of affection and sentiment', to its most right and best place. This in the same way that I often have Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain in my rucksack when I'm walking on Dartmoor, or Alice Oswald's Dart when I walk out to East Dart Head,
Whenever he is collecting logs with the Gamekeeper, Bookhound, will always leave in place the branches rooted to the ground by ivy, the ones that resist, this I'm told is out of respect. "For the Green Man," they both chime, before moving on to the wood that is more willingly given. Strange it may all seem, but read Lanny (and please do because I would love to know your thoughts) and maybe such sentiments are not quite so out of place after all, it doesn't do to disturb the Green Man.
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