It s America, 2049. The oil industry has gone but the damage has been done, and soaring temperatures are sending those not wealthy enough to live in floating cities scrambling for Canada s cooler climes.
Max Porter came to the public’s attention with his wonderful
Grief is The Thing With Feathers, an exploration of mourning that made metafictional use of Ted Hughes’
Crow poems. His second book,
Lanny, received high praise but left this reader cold: it seemed more
League of Gentlemen than the folk horror or emotional occult exploration of English village life and community it was touted as. Now Porter has turned his attention to Francis Bacon, an artist whose work we share a love of.
In a
Guardian interview Porter admits to ‘a long and uneasy obsession with the paintings of Francis Bacon’. Whilst Porter suggests that Bacon’s images are ‘honest’, something I’d agree with, he goes on to buy in to the prevailing myth of violence and horror that critics lazily associate with Bacon’s art, stating that ‘[t]he pictures seemed, more than anything else, to be telling the truth about the brief ludicrous reign of animal terror, human life. Bacon was ripping the art