A PINT WITH ... Max Porter Michael Wagg meets a writer whose first novel is a playfully experimental - if honest - exploration of grief with family at its heart Photos by Nik Strangelove nikstrangelove.com
very now and then a new book comes along and whacks you over the head, so to speak, with its brilliance. Grief is the Thing with Feathers is such a book. And what’s more the author is local. It’s the story of a grieving family, a father and two young sons coming to terms with the sudden loss of their wife and mother. The dad is an academic writing a book about Ted Hughes’ Crow. One night the doorbell rings, dad answers it and a crow enters, knocking dad to the floor. The crow says he will stay for as long as the family needs him. He’s a trickster, provocateur, carer, counsellor, nuisance, an imaginary friend, a real friend, a crow. It’s playful and serious, seriously funny and very moving. It’s an astonishing first book. I met Max Porter a few days after he’d appeared alongside Peckham’s Evie Wyld at a fantastic night, fittingly, at the Bookseller Crow’s Crow Lit Fest. I arrived at The Paxton to find him in the garden already tucking into a pint of Captain’s Brew from the London Beer Factory round the corner, and a bit frazzled from a trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair where foreign rights to the book are selling fast. Closer to home I hoped his book might have been made on these very streets. ‘Yes, absolutely, 100%. I sometimes write in Volcano Coffee Works, Parkhall. But other than that I didn’t want it to have anything to do with my day job [as an editor at Granta Books] so I had a routine where I cleared all my work stuff off my desk at home and didn’t have any internet connection. I would bath the children, feed the children, put them in bed, spend time with my wife … she got into Orange is the New Black, which had what seemed like unlimited episodes, so I had these nights where she was watching that and I was doing this.’ Max lives with his wife Jess and three young sons between West Norwood and West Dulwich and has been attracted to these parts from an early age. ‘I had
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a mate who lived in Crystal Palace, and it always felt like a seaside resort. I just feel like I’m on a holiday when I’m here. Maybe it’s the altitude making me giddy!’ The giddiness hasn’t eased and the family are now settled in the area. ‘I like the school my kids are at. I like the green space around here. I love the library in Crystal Palace and the sports centre. It’s very much the perfect place for us. I’ve always felt that Crystal Palace was something of a refuge. It’s a place that regenerates your affection the whole time.’ Grief is the Thing with Feathers refuses to be pigeonholed. It’s many things at once: at times a short novel that feels like a poem, at other times a play for voices. It’s also an essay on grief rooted in deeply personal experience, and a fable. ‘It’s a story about an ordinary bloke who loses his wife. The crow is to each whatever they need him to be at the time. He’s the obsession made manifest but he could have been anything. He could have been Bob Dylan records.’ The book is flighty, scattered across white space, cut-up into short sections, small and perfectly formed. I wondered how it was all put together: ‘It’s assembled from small pieces so I could write a little bit, leave it for a few days, think about it, send myself an email, and so when it came to it, it was just like a collage. And then when it started to sing and I had the three parts I would go back in and turn up the volume on different bits of it.’ The three parts are the alternating voices of ‘dad’, ‘boys’ and ‘crow’ which fade in and out of the story musically, as if sampled. Max talks of his student days living in Brixton, recording sounds on a collection of toy instruments, searching for the perfect beat, and somehow he’s still doing that. ‘It did feel to me like quite a sonic thing when I was writing it, partly because I was listening quite carefully to it and partly because having grown up making mix tapes for people I know that, say, a folk mix tape benefits from some non-folk, 39