'We’ve been here before – bizarre men naming themselves king and behaving horribly': author Max Porter on hope, history and his dog, Happy

Max Porter – bestselling author of wild, imaginative novels like Shy, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers and Lanny – is full of beans in his living room, wearing a yellow T-shirt that says “Listen to Sade”, telling me about his exciting weekend just outside his hometown of Bath. “I was camping in the haunted woods! I've previously had really weird times there, but we were in a patch that didn't seem overly haunted. We just had a tawny owl stay with us all night, chatting. It was beautiful."

An infectious, childlike energy, and love of nature, has always fuelled Porter's writing, and his new book is no exception. But Dogs and Bears is something new for him: a children’s picture book about two constantly brawling groups of beasts into whose world hundreds of squid start to fall from the sky, changing their behaviour. It's a book about war, climate change and cooperation in the style of a subtle, funny allegory, and he’s especially happy with its illustrations, by French artist Dorothée de Monfreid; she even included Porter’s dog, Happy. “She’s put him in there with a candy cane," Porter says, "and then he makes another glorious appearance being kicked in the bum."

He wrote it, he says, while “taking a break” – in which he ended up weaving, making pots, painting and drawing, he laughs – after a busy few years. Last year, two of his novels were adapted for film, and he wrote the screenplay for Steve, a version of Shy told from the teacher character’s perspective. (The film was led by his close friend Cillian Murphy, with whom he attended the 2024 Baftas when Murphy won Best Lead Actor for Oppenheimer; “that was a weird holiday from my life”.) Next up is a stage adaptation of Lanny at the Bristol Old Vic (“pinned in space by folk song through the ages, and throughout there’s going to be shadow puppetry … it’s going to be really special”), then comes a new novel, a graphic novel, and the results of “four or five” projects with musicians, plus a printmaker, engraver and sculptor.

“I do nothing on my own," Porter explains. "I’ve always been uneasy with the idea of the novelist in his shed or on his pedestal – and I say ‘his’ deliberately – with his official ability to tell the world what he thinks. Collaboration is water to me. It's hydration. It keeps me alive.”

The perpetual brawling came first, for obvious reasons in the world we live in. I really hate those children's books that attempt cute formulations. No, there will be brawling, it will be rough, and it will be upsetting. Then the peculiar weather event [of the raining squid], which only occurred to me much later, was like a genuine opportunity to talk to children about the bizarre symptoms of a climate catastrophe. I hope it’s not didactic!

My children are past that age and I miss it (his sons are 16, 14 and 11). I also partly wrote it to get myself back into that joyful place. It’s pure literature, isn't it? It's pure jokes, pure invention. Also, taking your work very seriously and yourself not so seriously [he performed at publisher Faber’s spring party wearing “a squid hat” and playing a toy keyboard] feels like a timely piece of medicine both for me and other people's idea of me!

I'm a very proud subscriber to History Today magazine – I read it on the loo – and we’ve had every version of this before. We've had plagues, we've had forever wars, we've had bizarre, eccentric men that name themselves king and behave horribly and end up pooing their pants on the global stage. This is a kind of a forever loop of behaviour. And I just thought, now, particularly now, what's a tingling, funny, eccentric, tongue-in-cheek approach to this? How can I reinstate joy?

It’s about actors. I was so chuffed to be able to watch actors work, to realise how strange it is, and how boring it is, and what it means for them as human beings to have to do this. The structures and institutional frameworks that they're in have such a peculiar effect on their brains – with all that, I was like a kid in a sweetshop.

How we’re heading into the years of a major literacy crisis in this country. The political frameworks we've been in, that know the impact of that, and have still shut the libraries or underfunded our arts institutions ... it's absolutely criminal. Anyone that calls themselves a writer, whether they're writing psychoanalytical academia or poetry or crime novels, must be 100% committed to the literacy effort, otherwise writing is like fiddling while Rome burns. Who do you think your reader will be?

This is hard. This is the problem with the right – they have such good messaging, partly because it's all absolute bollocks, but partly because they've been clever enough to work out that simple, misleading messaging feels true. If I was very rightwing, I would just immediately be able to go “Stop the boats”. So I suppose I would say … immediately end lobbying. No one can buy our democracy as of day one when I'm in charge. You cannot pay for policy. You cannot buy time or influence. 

Before breakfast, I would stop the flow of arms. I would stop the buying and selling of death from this little shop of horrors. Oh! And as I'm talking to the Nerve, I’ve just realised the first thing I should do is call Carole Cadwalladr and say: “Can you just come and do this with me, please? Let's have a 10am meeting with Palantir to tell them to get the fuck out of our country and then go from there.”

[The No Kings protests in] Minneapolis. Mamdani. Spring! As I get older, I find that spring is ever more galvanising. The fact of it coming around again even as we know more about the failings of our own bodies, as we’re losing people to sickness and illness, and when corruption seems so rampant and permanent. Every year I feel like I've taken a barrel-load of mushrooms, but I haven't. It's just May.

Just as I'm nodding off. I keep a notebook by my bed, and I’ll spin my old, sad, white legs out of bed, get my notebook, write something down, get back in, and then two seconds later, back out. My wife's got a pillow over her head! But as the clutter and detritus of the day are sinking, some stuff rises to the top.

Talk to us. We sit down and eat every night – I cook – and when I put the food on the table and we talk, sometimes it’s just absolute carnage. “Mum, did I tell you…” “Dude, your brother was talking!” But that to me feels as urgent and necessary a piece of mini social engineering as I can possibly be doing in the privacy and luxury and good fortune of my own home. To hear them, and want to listen.

Dogs and Bears by Max Porter, illustrated by Dorothée de Monfreid, is published by Faber on 30 July. You can pre order/buy from the Nerve Bookshop at a discount here