PORTER M

Madrid. Unfinished. Man Dying. A great painter lies on his deathbed. In a burst of literary brilliance, Max Porter translates into seven written pictures the explosive final workings of the artist's mind.

Death of Francis Bacon

Emmett

Grisly, shocking might be too trite a word for this, but - beautiful in a bleak, broken way. Full of short, sharp prose pieced together and piercing. It is not quite stream of consciousness but more resembling how a projector runs a reel of images, each clicking into place, a few continuous movements before the sudden switch into something else. Fragments of thoughts and scenes and pictures cobbled together into a jagged whole. This reader knows very little of the life and work of the actual Francis Bacon and so any precise references will sadly escape notice, but (maybe this is the important part but) this book makes me want to know more. He seems like a painter of reamed bodies, of exposed horrors, and what I have quickly googled in-between reading this to get a better sense of the description, of distorted forms and at times garish almost carnivalesque colours, seems to confirm what the writer has attempted to concentrate into words, giving both these regularly sparse passages with hard-hitting short phrases their power. There are glorious passages of a painterly mind finding its way through colour, simultaneously sensing and making form, the reader privileged to be abreast of the creative process:

'The fist interrupts with a wet sphlonk like a dollop thud onto the canvas and leaves a stain, deft impression, dent in the wet racing green, rather good actually, shut up a second, gives some doggy movement to the great waste of her face, rather good actually, canine, to have something scampering, something squirming, so I wrung it out in a bucket, the saturated fist, and used it like a cloth, swab, rubbed it back and forth against the nice clean flesh of the breast and the whole shape of the thing was suddenly terribly clear, brilliant, all it needed was some movement, bloody clumsy working from the photo, hiding, peeking, and the fist wobbling off like a tumour, voila. Now the green makes sense. Sorry if I'm repeating myself. I wonder if I could peel that neck of yours off and start again.'

Andrew Sztehlo

Mostly incomprehensible but beautifully written nonetheless. I imagine if you have a deep understanding of Francis Bacon you’ll understand this more than I did. This is not the third novel I thought it was, but rather, an interesting experimental side project / b side. Max Porter remains one of the best writers in the UK today, and I look forward to his eventual third novel.

Death of Francis Bacon

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