THE DEATH OF FRANCIS BACON

MAX PORTER

Faber, 80pp, £6.99

Max Porter, acclaimed novelist, has captured the final days of the 82-year-old artist Francis Bacon, dying in Madrid in 1992. Porter described the book as an ‘attempt to write as painting, not about it’, and in the Spectator, Laura Freeman loved it. ‘He dares to experiment and that means both the flare of mercury and the burnt crucible. Some sections enthral, others alienate. Like its subject, it is tricky, wicked and wonderfully weird.’

Reviewers struggled to categorise a work defying categorisation. The

Scotsman’s Stuart Kelly was enthralled. ‘It’s not a novel, although it has an arc, a clearly defined central character, development and revelation. It is also situated in a specific and true time and space – covering the last days of Bacon’s life in the hospital of the Handmaids of Maria in Madrid, tended to by one Sister Mercedes, which is irony enough given his pitiless and determinedly horrible versions of the crucifixion.’

In the Guardian Tim Adams found it ‘written in an allusive and sometimes vividly poetic shorthand, it tries to capture in language some of the texture of Bacon’s tormented canvases, as well as the chaos of his love life’. Johanna Thomas-corr in the New

Statesman and Adams both however advised research before jumping in. ‘It sometimes forgets,’ wrote Adams, ‘that there might be a reader listening in.’ And Thomas-corr wondered about the baffling cast of characters: ‘for a book like this to have a visceral punch, it needs to be self-reliant, not crying out for its own exhibition notes’.