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2.5 stars rounded up
Not quite sure why I’m reading this because I struggled with Porter’s first novel, Grief is a Thing with Feathers��. Like the previous novel this has several interspersed narrators. It is set in an English village about sixty miles from London. Like many English villages it is a cruciform shape revolving around a pub and a church; and like many English villages it has been there for centuries. The prime voices are Richard Lloyd and his wife Jolie (although her name isn’t divulged until later in the novel), an artist called Pete who has hippy credentials and is now getting on in years and there is one other main narrator. Here we wander into myth and legend. English history and folklore is littered with Green Man legends, portrayed in many churches with tendrils growing out of his mouth, a sort of ancient spirit/sprite/Puck who can also be corporeal and who has always been part of this village. Here he is named as Dead Papa Toothwort and he takes an active part in this narrative. He feeds off the life of the village and he is named after a parasitic plant (toothwort) which feeds off other plants as it has no chlorophyll of its own.
The narrative revolves around Lanny, the young son of Robert and Jolie. Lanny is curious, sweet and enigmatic and comes out with odd sayings:
“I’m a million cameras, even when I’m sleeping,�� or “Which do you think is more patient, an idea or a hope?��
Lanny is late primary school age and doesn’t really fit in with his classmates. His mother comes up with the idea of letting Lanny have art lessons with Pete. Pete, being an aging hippy type, doesn’t really do lessons, but they start to draw together and get along very well. Meanwhile Dead Papa Toothwort speaks like this:
“He leaves the village riding the smells from the kitchens, spinning and surfing, wafting and curling, from Jenny's lasagne to Larton's microwave stroganoff, Derek's hotpot-for-one, such rich sauces, so much sugar, was never so varied as this, not-very-recently-dead meat dressed in fancy flavours, he laughs, funny busy worker bees of the village stuffing their faces and endlessly rebuilding and replacing things. All they are is bags of shopping and bags of rubbish. He takes such offence to the smell of Pam Foy's stir-in jalfrezi sauce that he tears a bit of his nightmare skin off and shoves it through her window. A truly horrid dream. Sleep well Pam, he chuckles, as he floats homeward across the field.��
There is on particularly gruesome passage where Jolie finds a hedgehog trapped in a drain and is unable to free it, so she decides to put it out of its misery and basically smashes it to bits. It is a very unpleasant passage, but here is Dead Papa Toothwort’s reaction:
“He was crouched in the septic tank watching this and he found it very pleasing. He saw in it an aspect of himself, of his part in things. He watched the boy’s mum mashing a hedgehog, turning panic stricken animal into watery blood-spike soup, and he loved it very much, same as Mrs Lartan stamping on a poisoned mouse to finish it off, same as John and Oliver shooting Jackdaws at the tip, same as Jean drowning wasps in her jam trap. One day as good as any in the human war against others. He loved the foot and mouth culls and spent those months slipping in and out of burning livestock; nothing new to Toothwort, veteran witness of the bovine burcs, the flus, the wonderful rinderpest, rain rot and sheep scab, the cycles of mange, mastitis and pox, he’s seen things die in thousands of ways.��
Dead Papa Toothwort also listens in to conversations and you see little snippets in the text. They tend to be randomly strewed around, non-sequential, diagonal and printed sometimes on top of each other. This may be meant to be novel, clever or a different way of looking at the text: I just found it irritating.
In the middle of the novel Lanny disappears and Porter gets the opportunity to look at how people react to this sort of occurrence. Obviously the relationship between Lanny and Pete is questioned by the police and the village. Even a watertight alibi doesn’t stop him getting beaten up for being a peadophile. The parenting skills of Richard and Jolie are questioned: why was he allowed to go out alone and why was he allowed to visit an older male alone. Porter tries to highlight the best and worst of human nature and looks at the nature of Englishness:
“The thugs who will beat up an old man on the basis of a groundless rumour. The discord between what England believes itself to be and what it really is��
The character of Richard is drawn well: he is rather shallow, thinks his son is a bit of a freak, watches porn on his phone thinking his wife doesn’t know (she does) and is a typical entitled middle class male.
The ending, I found to be ridiculous and unbelievable, but I suppose the premise is if you have already read and accepted the folklore come to life that is Dead Papa Toothwort then you can accept the end of the book; unfortunately I didn’t.
There are some funny moments and some of the snatches of conversation that Dead Papa Toothwort overhears are spot on.
The portrayal of an English village as the centre of mysterious happenings has been done many times and I kept thinking of Agatha Christie and Miss Marple!
What does it all add up to? On the whole this has been very well received and I think Porter does make some interesting points about human reactions to the disappearance of a child and the fears and prejudices surrounding it. However I think it was better done in Reservoir 13. I also think that you have to take care when using folklore in a modern context (I’m not saying don’t do it), especially in the way it was used here. Some may love this, but it didn’t convince me, especially the ending.