Lanny

I sit at work in the city and the thought of him existing a sixty-minute train ride from me, going about his day in the village, carrying his strange brain around, seems completely impossible. It seems unlikely, when I'm at work, that we have a child and it is Lanny. If my parents were here, they'd surely say, No Robert, you've dreamt him. Children aren't like that. Go back to sleep. Go back to work.

Lanny is exactly suited to my tastes: Lyrical language that rolls out smooth and not pretentious; beautiful nature writing that waltzes the line between the real and the surreal; a core narrative about human relationships that brought me to gasps and tears; and a plot that somehow felt both timeless and precisely up-to-date, revealing those basic truths about humanity that have always been. Unusual and meaning-packed, this is what I've been looking for. I was totally hooked from the book's opening paragraph:

Dead Papa Toothwort wakes from his standing nap an acre wide and scrapes off dream dregs of bitumen glistening thick with liquid globs of litter. He lies down to hear hymns of the earth (there are none, so he hums), then he shrinks, cuts himself a mouth with a rusted ring pull and sucks up a wet skin of acid-rich mulch and fruity detrivores. He splits and wobbles, divides and reassembles, coughs up a plastic pot and a petrified condom, briefly pauses as a fiberglass bath, stumbles and rips off the mask, feels his face and finds it made of long-buried tannic acid bottles. Victorian rubbish. Tetchy Papa Toothwort should never sleep in the afternoon; he doesn't know who he is.

I went into Lanny not knowing anything about its plot, and I'd recommend the same for other readers: mildly spoilery beyond here, but even mild spoilers might impact another's enjoyment. So, from the warning to the details: Robert (a London-based businessman) and his wife Jolie (a famousish actress who is writing her first crime novel) have escaped to the country and moved to a picturesque village with their young son, Lanny. Lanny isn't like other kids: sweet and dreamy, nature-loving and creative, he floats through the streets singing nonsense songs to himself, attracting attention and queer looks. Dead Papa Toothwort – a Green Man avatar, older than the village itself and of unknown intent – spends his waking hours collecting scraps of human conversation (which swirl and swoop across the pages like jumbled poems) and he finds himself attracted to young Lanny as well: Surgical yearnings invade him, he wants to chop the village open and pull the child out. Extract him. Young and ancient all at once, a mirror and a key. Meanwhile, Lanny's Mom has arranged for the boy to receive art lessons from an eccentric local (“Mad” Pete might be in his eighties now, but he is a contemporary artist of some fame), and Pete and Lanny get on like old friends. The book is told in rotating first person POVs, and for the majority of it, we're in the minds of Robert, Jolie, Pete, and Dead Papa Toothwort. When a crisis occurs, the thoughts and voices of the other villagers are brought into the mix as well (in my opinion, brilliantly). More spoilery from here.

Such a perfect time of day, look at the time, time to bring in the washing, time to go and get Lanny for his tea, time to myself, time it took me to get up, walk around the house, peer into his room, call his name, water every empty patch of the house with his name, he does this every time, sing-song son-time sounding cheerful, calling Lanny-Bean into the garden, walking whistling Lan-Bun into the street, and if I had known then I would barely have been able to crawl across the road let alone stand admiring the light, if I had known. But I didn't know.

How the village at large and the main characters themselves react to the moment of crisis were perfectly revelatory of human nature, and to me, rather the point of the book. On the other hand: I've read a couple of reviews that bemoan the fact that author Max Porter took some lazy Brexit-type swipes – making the ugliest-acting residents charicatures of racist and xenophobic belief (Toothwort collects several out of context conversational fragments of the “they can bloody well go back to their own country” variety) – and I can only add that as a non-Brit, nothing struck me as very political here; there's so much variety in the snippets of conversation and villagers' attitudes that I didn't think they were being portrayed as any one thing or another (and, as a non-Brit, I was admittedly not looking for such socio-political stereotyping; it could well have been there and breezed over my head). I loved the language and the characters; I believed the action and reactions; I was moved and made to feel a range of emotions; I recognised myself and my fellows on the page, and I could want nothing more from a book.

Man Booker Longlist 2019:

• Margaret Atwood, The Testaments 
• Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier 
• Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, The Serial Killer 
• Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport 
• Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other 
• John Lanchester , The Wall 
• Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Everything 
• Valeria Luisell, Lost Children Archive 
• Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities
• Max Porter, Lanny 
• Salman Rushdie, Quichotte 
• Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World 
• Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein 

Eventually won by The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other in a tie, my favourites on the list were Lanny, Night Boat to Tangier, and An Orchestra of Minorities. I fear the Man Booker has become too political for me - favouring identity politics over excellent storytelling - and I don't know how much longer I'll think it a badge of honour to keep reading the longlists.