Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

This week, I'm very pleased to be joined by Max Porter. Max is the author originally of Grief is the Thing with Feathers, which was a huge hit two or three years ago, and he's returning with a book called Lanny.

Max, welcome.

Lanny, what sort of book would you characterize it as? Because it's sort of like its predecessor.

It's a strange mix of things.

I thought you're going to carry it up. No, I was going to say, how do you characterize it?

I call it a novel. Yeah, I call it a novel.

It's a novel.

And it's quite unapologetically borrows from techniques of play scripts and children's books and various other things.

Because I think the novel should be free to do so.

And I'm disappointed when novels don't use more of the things available to them.

So my novels will always, I hope, have different structural elements, yeah, from different genres.

Absolutely.

And it's set in a sort of village outside London, let it seem,

and it's got a sort of mythological element to it in the form of this character, dead papa tooth word,

who's a kind of presiding spirit. He's a kind of green man figure, isn't he?

Yeah. How does it, what sort of role does he take in the book? What's he?

He's a sort of post-green man. He's a sort of role does he take in the book? He's a sort of post-green man.

He's a sort of, he's a green man who understands that he's part of a storytelling

tradition, but also is kitsch.

So you have to load up the character with the knowledge that they're a device,

a bit like the crow in my first book.

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