Lanny
Max Porter
(Faber &?FABER, 224 PP, £12.99)
tablet bookshop price £11.69 • tel 020 7799 4064

“If you go down to the woods today/ you’d better go in disguise …” Even a teddy bear’s picnic is a worrisome thing, in a forest. Max Porter’s second novel, Lanny, delves deep into the troubled relationship an archetypal English village has with the undisciplined greenery which threatens it. It’s a beguiling, tender, funny, angry, word-rich fable; like Dylan Thomas crossed with a medieval morality play. It’s about innocence betrayed, about corruption, about bottle tops and the murder of a hedgehog. It crosses all boundaries between the imagination and the page – the words fly about like leaves, italicised, capitalised, interrupted.

As in all the best fables, there’s no sentimentality. Our idea of the Green Man is mixed up with Robin Hood – lawlessness with a moral basis. But Porter’s Green Man, Dead Papa Toothwort, is more like the imp in Lincoln Cathedral – malign survivor of an unforgiving world.