Max Porter

And the reason they dance on the page and they go over the edge of the printed margin is because I want to...

show the reader that they are not literature, they are overheard.

He's a voyeur.

He's a little bit like a novelist.

He listens to everybody all the time.

And so when I've done it in the UK, I've actually recorded them.

I've got 20 people in a room with a bit like this, with cutlery and dogs barking and doors slamming and a bit of rain on the roof.

And we did all the voices and they overlap slightly so that when I'm reading Dead Papa Toothwart, he literally pulls the sound

from the side, and it's a gorgeous thing.

It's like music.

It's more like playing a solo over a backing band.

And that, I hope, is the effect that the reader can achieve for themselves.

Like, I want to credit the reader as being fairly accomplished in the way they listen to radio, watch TV, read books, and that they can actually have a kind of counterpoint going on while they're reading.

And it's not...

I don't want you to read every word of that and fixate on the meaning and on whether there's any plot pattern in it.

I want you to sort of let it glide over you so that later in the book when you start to hear echoes and there's some kind of texture to the patterning in the book, I want you to think, did I hear that?

Or did I make that up?

Or did I read that?

Or am I intuiting that?

Or am I kind of complicit in that thought?