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.
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