Given the choice, Lanny will always choose the woods.
Max Porter
There is something undeniably sinister about toothwort, the subterranean parasitic plant whose waxy pink flower spikes poke through woodland leaf mould in spring like the upstretched fingers of something about to rise, or perhaps the last traces of someone interred. And Max Porter tapped into that disturbing undercurrent in his creation of Dead Papa Toothwort — demi-god, Green Man, demon, genius loci — the ubiquitous being pivotal to the story of Lanny. Ancient and eternal, Toothwort manifests that aspect of nature that we often resist in our averted, sanitised world view; an aspect as dark, deadly and dangerous as it is vivid, quick and deep.
Toothwort stalks the periphery of Porter’s English every-village, unseen but all-seeing, collecting voraciously the tatters of the villagers’ chaotic self-expression, snatches of thought and speech that are depicted in winding, weaving text upon the page. Most keenly of all, he sees humanity’s abuse of the natural world and has his own uncomfortable idea of retribution. But his gaze also fixes upon Lanny Greentree, the small boy whose perception somehow reaches beneath the leafy surface of things to the underlying mystery, touching Toothwort’s world in a way that Toothwort finds irresistible. A source of love and mystification to his distracted parents, befriended by an ageing artist known locally as Mad Pete, Lanny roams the village, woods and fields alone. Like Toothwort, he is invisible in plain sight; apparently everywhere, and then — quite suddenly — nowhere.
When Lanny goes missing, the story jolts us into a cruel tangle of press intrusion, sniffer dogs and interview rooms; all the paraphernalia of Sunday night police procedurals and psychological dramas, but expressed in the same distinctive narrative style. The disparate, self-involved village voices we heard before are united on this one topic. Suspicions form, fix, fracture. But the twists — and the tests — are only just beginning.
Lanny is a novel about the rich and potent history of human habitation in England; the births, lives and deaths of every domesticated, wild and feral thing; the changes wrought; the damage done. Sharing Toothwort’s seething, unsightly, raw yet grotesquely complex comprehension of our impact upon the natural world, we fear him. But we also need him. The assertion of this absorbing, strange and often (in one instance, very) shocking fairy tale is that the world may yet preserve and support us, but only if we show it the respect it deserves.
Turning a blind eye will be our doom.
Something about this is so reminiscent of the New Orleans I know.. not only the tangled morass of nature beneath which who knows what, but also the perspective its natives have regarding death and decay and their magpie-like collections on loved ones’ graves.
You make me think I would love this story. xx