![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It plays pretty close to the edge over which lie the fey and the kooky anyone allergic to green men may need to take a deep breath. Lanny is similarly remarkable for its simultaneous spareness and extravagance, and again it is a book full of love. It follows his startlingly original debut, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, the dark, comic, wild, beautiful prose-poem-novel that was a runaway success in 2015 and won the Dylan Thomas prize. Max Porter’s second novel is a fable, a collage, a dramatic chorus, a joyously stirred cauldron of words. We also watch Lanny from the perspective of Dead Papa Toothwort, an ancient spirit who stirs in the ground and has seen all life in this place. We see him, and we miss him, through the eyes of his rapturously devoted mother, a father who can’t feel the same closeness, an ageing artist who cherishes Lanny’s buoyant creativity, and a whole company of local people whose voices rise and fall in an “English symphony”. ![]() L anny is a gloriously idiosyncratic little boy, busy building dens, talking to trees, enchanting and baffling his parents getting on with the endlessly interesting stuff of life in an “ordinary home-county place”, a rural village in commuting distance of London. ![]()
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