Roundtable: Lanny
Words by Harvey Weir
Max Porter’s Lanny was published in 2019. A poet long before he was a prose author, Porter has infused his second novel with the beauty of his verse, as well as the disregard of form often seen in contemporary poetry. This essay is intended as a writer’s aid, and a companion piece to our podcast episode, where I and guest speaker Edward explore the novel in depth.
Art credit Ben Lustenhouwer
Lanny is strange, with an entire character written in bold, who listens to the conversations of townspeople which dart around the page
in strange and
unfamiliar
positions.
This bolded character, Dead Papa Toothwort, morphs from form to form with nebulous joy, suffusing the rubbish of the English country town he calls his home with his consciousness. He is a manifestation of the land, of its memory and its cycle of life, English folklore and myth dragged brutally into the modern day of plastic bottle caps and used condoms. It is through him we first encounter the town, and Lanny, and their story.
The book starts with Toothwort awakening one day and flitting through the town, drinking from the steady stream of greetings and gossip from the people around him. Then we meet Lanny, the town’s juvenile pariah, loved by most and discussed by all. Lanny is the centre of the story, encircled by our other characters — his parents, his art teacher Pete, Dead Papa Toothwort — who each subsist, in their own way, on his energy. Porter however never allows us to see the world through Lanny’s eyes alone; we never enter the titular character’s head, always observing him through the lens of a parent, or Pete, or the townsfolk, or Toothwort.
Lanny’s plot is hard to summarise. Structurally, little happens, and the novel is more concerned with how things happen, and how they are seen and how this seeing impacts the reader. The key events are as follows: we are introduced to Lanny through Toothwort’s obsession with him, then through the eyes of his parents. His mother, a writer of visceral crime fiction, is inspired by her son while his father is puzzled and conflicted by him. Lanny begins taking art lessons with local reclusive artist “Mad” Pete, and the two find a nourishing and joyful friendship. Lanny’s parents, Jolie and Rob, experience some marital friction and his mother reminisces on the struggles of adjusting to life outside the city. They watch Lanny write ‘spells’ in his notebook and claim to hear the voices of the dead speaking through tree branches and animals. Satisfied his strangeness is harmless, the adults continue with their lives — until Lanny goes missing. At this point the book fractures, and presents a section comprised entirely of fragmented lines from the mouths of countless townspeople; some sympathetic, some cynical, some gossipy, some reproachful. At last, we return to the perspectives of Lanny’s parents and Pete, as they are confronted by Toothwort and forced to engage in surreal ‘tests’, where they reckon with their own perceptions of Lanny. Finally, Jolie is granted a vision of Lanny the day he disappeared, and sees him fall through the broken grill of a storm drain. Kept alive by Toothwort’s gifts of fresh fruit, nuts and parcels of water, Lanny is found by his parents and returned home. The novel ends some years later. Lanny has grown up and shed, or perhaps lost, his elfin strangeness. His parents have divorced, but his mother is now a successful crime novelist. Pete no longer makes new art. The last scene is Lanny and Pete embracing in the woods, drinking beer and settling down to draw the trees around them.
Perception
Lanny would be thrilled to be compared to a March hare, leaping in the long grass, boxing his own reflection. A bringer of strange dreams, skipping about the wide open village.
For a book in which so little seems to happen, Lanny contains an astounding level of depth and vividness. Part of this can be attributed to Max Porter’s style of research; he lived in a small village in south England for months on end, taking notes on the mannerisms and traits of each of its inhabitants until he had a compendium of heavily realistic and realised characters. The novel’s richness must also be attributed to his prose, which is beautiful and poetic in many places, and heart-wrenchingly concise in others. Most crucial to this vividness, however, is the text’s relationship to perception. Porter himself has remarked that he knows ‘everything’ about each one of his characters — except Lanny, who he lets exist only in the minds of others, created entirely from their perceptions of him. In this way he creates the modern myth of Lanny, the strange, wise, sensitive wunderkind who brings light and magic to the town. He gives us the same perspective of Lanny as the rest of the townsfolk, keeping us at arm’s length in a way that only strengthens our obsession with the title character, the distance immersing us deeper in the world.
It’s a sophisticated technique, one that capitalises on our self-awareness as readers as well as our willingness to forgo that awareness in order to enjoy a great story. We know Lanny is important; we know that from the title. We know he’s magical, because he exists in a text that also contains a very real creature of folklore, a fae-spirit equal parts threatening and beautiful — and this creature is obsessed with Lanny. We know Lanny is the hero of the story because we are used to stories where the smart young boy with magical gifts is the hero, and where the monstrous entity that obsesses over him is the villain. But we can’t perceive him directly, and he is directly absent from a large swathe of the text, leaving us to reckon with his absence just as the townspeople do. By manipulating our perceptions and overlaying them with those of the perspective characters, Porter creates a feeling of closeness and connection between us and a character who is impossible to connect with.
Non-magical realism
But darling we’ve talked about this so often, you cannot fix the way the world is broken all on your own.
Dead Papa Toothwort frames the story; despite the title and our instincts as a reader, he is closer to being the protagonist than Lanny is, leading us through the village and showering us with the flavour of conversation and goings-on that it holds. He is brutally non-realistic, written with purple prose and given a ravenous hunger for words and sensations and existence at which we can’t help but feel discomfited. His presence should, it seems, detract from the matter-of-fact nature of the regular human goings-on; the grounded, ‘realist’ issues of Lanny’s parents’ marital struggles, or Mad Pete’s struggle with acceptance by the other townspeople. But Toothwort doesn’t detract from the story at all — he frames the story, like a bookend, with intervals woven throughout the piece. But he is not the protagonist — the novel’s true heart is the village, and the banality of the everyday.
Here we return to the idea of perception and of our distance from Lanny himself. Why — in this book about this precious, unique child — is our only non-standard viewpoint character not the child himself, but the boogeyman?
Why, if Lanny’s mind is so wondrous and his insights so profound, do we mainly perceive him through the minds of the ordinary?
The answer lies in verisimilitude.
We need to be able to believe the unreal threat of Toothwort exists within this place that holds Jolie and Rob and Pete and all the other ‘ordinary’ humans — or maybe more accurately, we need to believe that those humans and their conflicts can exist within the strange world that holds Toothwort and Lanny.
If we saw the world through Lanny’s eyes, in the wondrous, strange, way he does, we would not be floored like we are when Lanny’s mum rolls up her sleeves and stabs a hedgehog to death. We would probably not care so much about Robert’s pitiful apathy, or Pete’s vilification when Lanny goes missing. We would be living in an entirely magical perspective with vivid dreams of running with/in/as a deer and the laments of a dead girl beneath a tree.
We need to be grounded in the real for all this to land, and Porter understands that.
Art credit David Davies
God gave me an ending, and I rewrote it
Max Porter hates endings. He hates writing them, and he hates reading most of them too. To him, they are rarely worthy of the story that leads to them. In Lanny, he has given us a non-ending. When Lanny is found, we cut from the perspectives of those we have grown to love, resent and cherish. Instead, wizened old Peggy, the town’s batty lady, tells us from beyond her grave:
False things, endings. Sustenance for fools and never what they claim to be... Nevertheless.
Lanny is no more. He goes by a new name, he tells a simple story of his disappearance — no boogeyman, no parcels of berries and water, no magic — and he leaves the memories of Toothwort behind. Tries to, at least.
The last scene we get is the person formerly known as Lanny meeting Pete in the woods, to drink beer and sketch the trees.
This ending is nothing. It tells us nothing about Lanny’s direction — we already know where he’s been, and all we get is knowledge of where he is. We don’t see where he wants to go, or where he ends up. This, in accordance with Porter’s general preferences, is the perfect way to ‘end’ this story. We, as taken with Lanny’s wonder as the characters in the book, imprint upon him the future for him we want to see, whether it’s closer to the ‘straight and narrow’ path Robert hoped for, or to the wild freedom of the artistic potential Pete saw in him.
Lanny is grounded because of how it ties you down with its beauty. It’s freeing because of how it dives into the unreal from the real.
In Max Porter fashion, I’m going to end this write-up with a tip of the hat to this beautiful piece of fiction, and a non-ending.
Art credit Robert Robin Fenson