The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter, review: cruel, funny and grotesque

In 1998, a 17-year-old Max Porter stood for an hour in front of a Francis Bacon triptych, transfixed. Like so many teenagers before him, he loved the painter’s brutality, his darkness, his insistence that “we are all meat” (a Bacon quip the adolescent Porter pinned to his bedroom wall).

That triptych showed Bacon’s lover, George Dyer, sitting on a lavatory, dying. In a 2016 essay, Porter recalled looking at this “broken, rolling, squashed, organic heap” and thinking: “This work is fit for purpose.” The Death of Francis Bacon is also fit for purpose. It is a mirror of Bacon’s paintings: tragic, cruelly funny, shallow, repetitive, wild, controlled, grotesque.

Porter’s third short novel – at barely 6,000 words, his shortest – is also his most experimental. -Chapters take the form of what the jacket calls “written pictures” (the first is titled “Preparatory Sketch – Non-existent, pencil on paper, 6 x 4 in”). Each describes the same scene, the kind of two-figure study Bacon loved: “one body -prostrate,/ another attending.”

These bodies are the painter, on his deathbed at the Handmaids of Maria clinic in Madrid, and his nurse, Sister Mercedes, reading to him as he drifts in and out of consciousness. Each “picture” opens with Bacon saying “take a seat why don’t you”, and closes with Mercedes’s “intenta descansar” (“try to rest”) – creating the feeling that this moment could play out in minutely altered versions forever.

Porter’s previous books casually mixed prose and verse, but were always effortlessly readable. The prose-poetry here, however, is disorientating and allusive, prickly, like its subject. It owes a debt to the dwindling deathbed gabble of Beckett’s The Unnamable. Sometimes it becomes a playscript for a line or two: “Francis (Broncoespasmo) Wheeze.” These snatches of dialogue could be the only words we are meant to take as actually spoken; without speech-marks, everything else is filtered through an untrustworthy, shape-shifting narrative voice.

That voice is most engaging when it’s showing the painter’s hungry eyes at work. He looks at Mercedes: “She turns and suddenly that is a handsome prospect, twisted neck, thick line of brown shadow, that’s what I’d seen this morning, nag-at-me ridge-bone, rather unholy, little bull at the door beneath a broken nose. I’d love to see her snarl.” A passage mourning Dyer’s death is equally vivid, but elsewhere the voice is less firmly characterised. “Hungry starch and starve, all your thoughts of food and fizz”: this is Porter’s Bacon, but it could easily be Crow from his first book, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, or Dead Papa Toothwort from his second, Lanny. His characters have a fondness for heavy alliteration, monosyllables and “gloopy” words like “wobbling” and “shplonk”. I’ve a suspicion they share DNA with Roald Dahl’s BFG.

Several times, Mercedes offers a choice of two bedtime stories – “The martyr Edward or the painter Francis?”, “Julius Caesar or the painter Francis Bacon?” Bacon opts for “anyone but Bacon”, and so the historical death-scenes are described in thick impasto (with interruptions and digressions) as if Bacon is imagining how he would paint them.

In one section, the voice seems to become Porter’s own, discussing his reasons for writing this book: “It’s an attempt to express my feelings about a painter I have had a long unfashionable fixation with./ It’s an attempt to get art history out of the way and let the paintings speak.” But art history – or, at least, the history of art criticism – continues to get in the way.

Porter digs up various damning criticisms of Bacon’s limitations, as if to prove he’s outgrown his teenage hero-worship. There are quotations from John Berger (“Bacon is... not finally important”; “a brilliant stage manager rather than an original artist”) and barbs of Porter’s own invention (“Cheap trick successes, related to Heal’s, Habitat, Home Interiors Magazine more than to the great painters he slavishly imitates.”) There’s something desperately sad about the stance he has Bacon take in defence: “Find me a painter alive today who can do what I do in the time I can do it, no help. Alone.” When was art ever about getting it done quickly?

If Bacon became a parody of -himself in his later years, Mercedes’s final either/or choice allows an escape from that sad diminishment: would we prefer to hear about his real, quiet death on holiday in Spain in 1992, or his imagined murder in Soho in 1979? In this slim but meaty book, the latter becomes a fairy-tale ending.

Order The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter, 80pp, Faber, from the Telegraph Bookshop for ￡6.99 (0844 871 1514)