Lanny is one of the most original books I have ever read, up there with Milkman by Anna Burns — winner of the Booker in 2018 — although as stories go they are chalk and cheese.
Milkman tells the story of ‘middle-sister’, a woman who lives in an unnamed city, although clearly Belfast during the troubles. She’s currently going out with ‘maybe-boyfriend’, but life for her is never that easy. It is a story based around secrets and suspicions and gossip and who you know. And who you shouldn’t. It’s not an easy read, but a remarkable one.
Lanny is a little boy; a very special little boy who, as well as being naturally creative, is also blessed with an intelligence, wit and a sense of life’s joys that belies his years. He lives in a small English village with his dissatisfied but loving mother and his frustrated and distant father who is out of his depth living in the countryside.
Also living in the village is an older man labelled Mad Mike, who isn’t mad at all, just his own person, but that brings along with it all manner of judgements and biases. After all, to ordinary people, different is dangerous. Mike is an artist, a very talented artist who, in his own words, has had dissertations written about him and who could sell any one of hundreds of pieces of art in his house and buy, outright, the Police station he is being questioned in.
Lanny and Mad Mike love the outdoors and it is that which brings them together. They explore the countryside together — its beauty and its bounty, it’s death and decay, its colour and chaos. It is Mike that introduces Lanny to art and they spend a lot of time in Mike’s house drawing and painting, although it’s charcoals that Lanny keeps returning to.
Dead Papa Toothwort is, for me, what makes the book stand out as special. He is, from my interpretation anyway, yours may be different, the spirit of nature, of the trees, of the earth, father or husband to Gaia perhaps. He can take any form and can hear and tune into any conversation in the village.
The conversations that he hears add a lovely touch to the prose, and are inserted often into the book as irregular text, weaving and twisting on the page, some characters large, some small; art as well as literature, poetry as well as prose.
Some examples:
I suggest he get an effing job and vacate that bar stool
Nice slow shag and a lie-in
I recommend sturdy Veronica for a splash of colour in your borders, impromptu meeting of the watercolour society, mad old coot…
But, lest you think the story twee, tragedy strikes. Lanny disappears.
Part two is brilliantly written, covering in short, episodic, stand alone paragraphs snippets of individual, societal and media soundbites and opinions as to what has happened to Lanny. There is anger, betrayal, scapegoating, blaming, scaremongering, it’s all there in crisp, precise prose.
And guess who is ripe for the worst of the pillorying? After all an elderly man spending time with a young boy. Mad Mike is beaten up, his house vandalised and damaged, questioned again and again by the Police.
The whole novel is a beautiful example of how much can be told by so few words. In fact the whole novel is only about 200 pages with plenty of whitespace. I would normally have a moan about that, about not getting what you paid for, but this book needs to be this way. It is a visual artwork as well as a literary one.
This is the only work I’ve read of Maxs’. His first book, Grief is the thing with Feathers, was shortlisted for The Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. It’s on my list.
Lanny is a beautiful, witty, sad, exasperating at times, but intriguing book that you will read in two or three sittings, then put back at the bottom of the pile to have another go again later.
Worth a look.
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