The awful is pretty awful: One of Shy’s offenses is having attacked another boy with a broken beer bottle. He’s both a hapless, hurting child and a dangerous, violent young man, and his author has loved each part of him into being with the same steady attention. At one moment, he’s blessed with the raver’s revelation that “God is a bouncy bastard who wants his people together in the dance.”

We’re privy to the churn of his unvoiced thoughts, which sometimes feel like “a roll of barbed wire scrunched inside me, scraping underneath, all day every day” and other times keen into the ecstatic, especially when he’s encased in his headphones, immersed in a mix. Part of the novel’s poignancy is that Shy himself doesn’t talk much (clue’s in the name). They include his long-suffering mum and stepfather a painfully kind counselor called Jenny his mate Benny, with whom he wants to start a label, Atomic Bass Recordings and Amanda, a live-in staff member who “sits in her dungarees with her mug of tea and hears whatever the boys want to tell her.” Porter moves nimbly between the voices of Shy’s universe as they replay in his memory. Though the novel’s time frame is just a few hours of one night, it’s a night of “a shattered flicker-drag of these sense-jumbled memories” and one in which “the solid world dissolves then coheres like broken sleep, and he shambles into it, remembering.” In other words, the night’s as big as Shy’s life. The book’s true setting, however, is the sprawling, shifting terrain of Shy’s mind.

A single man book review