50 LISTENER JUNE 1 2019
BOOKS&CULTURE
by CATHERINE ROBERTSONL
iterary fiction writers tread danger-
ous ground when they attempt a
novel that adopts elements from
genre fiction. Ursula Le Guin
roundly rebuked Kazuo Ishiguro for
worrying that his readers might dismiss
The Buried Giant as fantasy. Ian McEwan
said recently in this publication that he
didn’t consider Machines Like Me to be
science fiction because the genre wasn’t
“human enough” to interest him, a com-
ment that risked summoning Le Guin
from beyond the grave.
Now it’s Jeanette Winterson’s turn
to use genre fiction as a way to throw aby LINDA HERRICKF
or millennia, carvings of a pagan
nature spirit known as the Green
Man have circulated throughout
Europe. He symbolised the bond
between man and nature. But today’s
Green Man is more likely to be a pub.In Lanny, Max Porter’s second novel,
following 2015’s acclaimed Grief Is the
Thing with Feathers, he reawakens him as
Dead Papa Toothwort, an ill-tempered
ancient spirit who presides over an Eng-
lish woodland where citizens of a local
village have dumped loads of rubbish.
As a being of the land, Dead Papa
absorbs the junk – exhaust pipes, plastic
pots, old baths. The desecration stokes his
rage and he periodically seeks revenge.
The shapeshifter also likes to shrink at
dusk to eavesdrop on the villagers, their
disjointed utterances represented by curl-
ing lines of italicised words trailing around
the page, while his chapters leap out in a
bold black font. He chews on the words
as he searches for his favourite resident,
a pure little boy: Lanny. Dead Papa is so
enchanted by him, he yearns to “chop the
village open and pull the child out”.
We see Lanny only through others’
eyes: his mother, Jolie Lloyd, an emotion-
ally damaged former actor working on asadistic thriller; his father, Robert, a porn-
addicted money trader who commutes
each day to London; Peggy, a lonely old
lady; and Pete, a solitary artist.Lanny is an ethereal child. Robert
thinks he has a “strange brain”; the
villagers, who treat the Lloyds as outsid-
ers, regard him as backward. Lanny’s art
lessons with Pete produce a strange figure,
one that is crucial to later events in this
fable of a collision between the primeval
and the modern.The kiss
of death
Jeanette Winterson’s
unpicking of Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein
isn’t her best work.
The nature of
the beast
Max Porter’s second
novel is an unsettling
mystical fable of an
English village and a
missing child.
Dead Papa walks through
the village, “whistlinghis dream into being”. He
slides into homes via theplumbing.
Max Porter: awakening the Green Man as the
shapeshifting Dead Papa Toothwort.Jeanette Winterson: uses
genre fiction to throw a
light on modern problems.