This novel was definitely odd, but I like a bit of odd from time to time. I am one of a small number who didn't enjoy 'The Curious Incident...' and I'd read some unfavourable reviews of this one so I wasn't sure what to expect. And I'm still not totally sure what I got, but I can say it was beautifully written and I really enjoyed it. I loved that it unsettled me, that I wasn't quite sure what was going on, that it was all a bit weird. I loved the Shakespeare and Wilkins section; it put me in mind of Lincoln in the Bardo which is no bad thing. I loved the Greek retelling and the ending of that narrative strand - so full of potential and in stark contrast to the initial story arc which is unabated tragedy. Most of all, I loved the layers of meaning and significance to this book and how they merge together to create a truly engrossing piece of work.

I could not get into this book, ultimately it was not form me and I could not finish it. It may be one for other readers

Such an unusual read, by another author the moving through time and character switches may not have worked, but I was hooked until the very end.

I must first apologise for not reviewing this sooner – I read it what seems like forever ago and never finished my review and now I have a partial and the feeling I was left with.

Drawn in by the blurb, I started reading, only to quickly find myself feeling like I was missing something. The writing is great but, finding myself suddenly in ancient Greece and a retelling of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and then 17th century London (with Shakespeare and Wilkins which didn’t – in my mind – add anything at all to the story) was disjointing and while I really enjoy some Greek retellings, this left me confused as to what the purpose was in places, sadly drawing me out of the tale too much to truly enjoy it.

Only a 2.5 I’m afraid, rounded to 3 because the writing really is good.

CW: child abuse, incest, sexual assault, sexual content, violence, gore, death, slavery.

The Porpoise is one of those books I was really excited about when I first found out about it: I had loved Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and so I was very much looking forward to this. Then, I somehow forgot about it as it got lost in my massive TBR and I only recently rediscovered it. Unfortunately, it didn't quite meet my expectations.

The Porpoise follows two parallel storylines, with snippets of a third one sprinkled throughout. The first one, set in apparently modern times, follows Angelica, a beautiful young woman who lives in solitude with her rich, overprotective father ever since as a baby she was the sole survivor of a plane crash. But in this gilded cage horrible secrets are kept, until one day a visitor understands more than he should and becomes the target of a skilled assassin. As he flees aboard a ship called The Porpoise, his own story merges with a past tale, a retelling of the myth of Pericles, which forms the second storyline.

The premise was really interesting, but the execution just didn't work for me. I was often confused as the book jumped between the two storylines and the interludes featuring none other than Shakespeare himself. I ended up not caring about any of the characters at all, and there are so many of them (maybe even too many). There was also quite a lot of graphic violence which I was not expecting, and some of the themes were hard to stomach which possibly contributed to my unease when reading this. I alternated between bored and confused for most of this and the few passages and underlying themes that were interesting were sadly just not enough for me to enjoy this book.

I did find the writing to be beautiful (and possibly one of the only redeeming features of this). I really liked the richness of the prose and the vivid descriptions, so I was even sadder when I just couldn't connect with the characters! The underlying critique of wealth and its power to corrupt, persuade or coerce those who are surrounded by it was also interesting but for me it was just too little, too late.

Unfortunately, this one was just not the right fit for me, but given the author's rich writing and wealth of characters and events, I can certainly see how it might work for other readers out there.

Thank you to the publisher for my eARC copy of this book. Unfortunately I didn’t love this book and therefore didn’t finish, I just didn’t connect with this one. Not for me, sorry.

I have to admit a certain amount of shame with The Porpoise - I was granted the ARC back in February 2019 and I started it that May just ahead of its initial publication date. Having loved ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time’ I was excited to read something new by Mark Haddon. I got to about 20% of the way through, where Darius somehow, inexplicably turns into Pericles, put it down and never picked it back up again. It then proceeded to haunt my Goodreads ‘Currently Reading’ list, staring up at me every time I logged in for almost *2 years* before I picked it up again in the hope of clearing out my TBR. This time however, I finished it in two sittings and learnt my lesson to just persevere with books I don’t initially enjoy!

The Porpoise is an odd story; it’s essentially a re-telling of the play Pericles, Prince of Tyre, written in equal halves by William Shakespeare and George Wilkins. There’s perhaps a reason why this Shakespeare story is not particularly well-known or often retold as it’s a bit of a meandering epic, with Shakespeare’s usual trademarks of confusing identity changes and too convenient coincidences which muddy the waters a little. This is interspersed with the story of Angelica, a teenage girl whose father abuses her and as a result she retreats into her imagination. It’s kind of implied that she is making these scenes up in a dream after reading the book but I perhaps would have liked a little more hints to this throughout or some more of her experiences influencing the story. There’s also a very weird segue halfway through where we briefly meet George Wilkin’s after he has died and see his journey into the afterlife. This was very weird and jarred with everything around it – I honestly do not understand why it was included.

I skimmed the synopsis for Pericles before I started reading The Porpoise and I’m glad that I did. I think if you are already aware of the story you will get more out of the book than going in cold. Most of it seems very faithful to the original, with a few tweaks here and there. I didn’t understand why nearly all of the character’s names had been kept the same except the wife who was called Chloe instead of Thaisa. I think this change would have worked better if it was perhaps a re-working of the name Angelica to perhaps link the two stories together? In any case, I actually enjoyed the story of Pericles and it’s very well told although it’s hard to tell whether this is a credit to its source material or if Haddon should be praised for this. Having only read the synopsis of Pericles it’s hard to tell.

Overall, if you are able to persevere and suspend your disbelief then The Porpoise is an interesting book. However, it feels as though it’s two stories that aren’t properly linked and this seems like a missed opportunity. Thank you to NetGalley, Random House UK, Vintage Publishing and Chatto & Windus for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Started off well, as a family story, dealing with distressing and difficult topics, but nevertheless engaging. However, the book took a turn for the bizarre and I couldn’t finish it. It was disjointed and confusing and felt too much like hard work for my leisure time. Very disappointing, because I’ve loved the other books by this author.

TW: Sexual abuse and incest.

The big negative to The Porpoise is that, having finished it, I don’t actually know what I read. The plot is based on the Greek legend of Apollonius and his exposure of a king who falls in love with his own daughter after the death of his wife, and the incestuous relationship that follows. This isn’t a story I was familiar with, but feels pretty standard for Greek mythology. However, the narrative of The Porpoise isn’t as straightforward as that. The book opens with the story of Philippe, who’s wife is killed in a plane accident, developing a deeply unhealthy obsessive with his daughter, Angelica – the sole survivor of the crash. Some years later, a young man makes an attempt to rescue Angelica, fails, and escapes on board The Porpoise. At this point, the book expands into a new storyline following the tale of Pericles. As if this wasn’t enough, another thread is introduced with Shakespeare, so the book ends up covering at least three stories at once and I never managed to quite work out where they all linked up.

Despite my lack of comprehension, I still thoroughly enjoyed this book. If you take the different threads as separate stories, you can just enjoy them for what they are, which is beautifully written and quite exciting stories of familial abuse, escape and adventure.

The Porpoise is a unique and engaging novel, highly entertaining despite the uncomfortable subject matter. It certainly won’t be for everyone, but it is guaranteed to be a good read for anyone who can properly get to grips with the narrative style and multilayered plot.

Having not read the juggernaut that was Mark Haddon's 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time', I came to this novel completely unaware of his style. What a joy to read the work of such a gifted author who weaves tales and twists out of innocuous beginnings and shocks you to the core with the simplest of sentences.
'The Porpoise' is not the easiest of reads due to its structure and is best read consistently and expeditiously to keep all the threads bouncing along vibrantly in your brain.
And how it pays off, with scenes and circumstance to enjoy and wonder over for years to come.
It is not perfect; as the author says in his own thanks, there are mistakes. This makes it fit even more as a fantasy, fable or fever dream and perhaps more likeable as a result.
When you read such writing, it makes a reader revel in the imagination and wordskill of another, if you can go with it and if you can't then I'm afraid you're missing out on one of fiction's golden adventures.

Based on a Greek legend, this novel challenges the reader through different time periods and a wide cast of characters. The Porpoise is a very clever read which has clearly been thoroughly researched and a considerable amount of time has gone into developing such a rich plot. As a fan of mythology I enjoyed each turn this book took however at times it was a little too intelligent for its own good.

A book with many journeys sometimes confusing but full of intrigue the view of how life over time can be connected makes you think

The Porpoise is a book of two halves, two worlds, two dimensions, myth and reality, now and then, all of which blends into one whole and then unfolds outside the boundaries of time and space.
A mother dies in a plane crash and her baby is cut out of her womb. The baby-girl’s father transfers to her his love for his dead wife, but his love (or perhaps it is veiled hatred) is selfish and warped, expressed through incest. A young man tries to save the girl, but is discovered and pursued by an assassin sent after him by the father. The girl is trapped but, at a great personal cost, escapes into the ethereal realm of her fantasies, thus freeing herself from the unbearable reality she has been forced to share with her father all her life. And this where each of the characters crosses into the other world. That world isn’t kinder or better. It is equally dangerous and even more brutal - a typically fatalistic setting of a Greek myth. Their stories continue under a different guise: the story of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (inspired by the play by Shakespeare), starring Pericles himself and his faithful companions, as well the incestuous King Antioch, the treacherous Dionyza, the tragic Chloe, hers and Pericles’s daughter, Marina. They all face cruel challenges, survive betrayal and death, and are tested and punished in ways that have nothing to do with what we would consider justice.
The writing is urgent, taut, engrossing. The book is written in the present tense, which lends it even more urgency. No time is wasted on the conventions of dialogue, or on superfluous adjectives. I was gripped by every new development and swept away in its current. Even though the plot jumps between different characters and eras, it all seems so immediate and intimate, and the characters are so vividly drawn that I had no problem re-engaging with them. The descriptions are dynamic – you watch, rather than read them, like this marketplace:
"He is in the alleyway again. A blind woman is doing conjuring tricks, coloured pebbles appearing and disappearing in her dancing hands. He turns a corner. A boy has stolen a loaf. The baker curses but does not give chase. The boy is a rabbit vanishing into brambles. He turns another corner. A donkey lifts its tail and sprays wet shit all over the white toga of a man at the adjacent stall. The crowd applaud. Pericles leaves the market through the triple arch of the eastern gate and stumbles down the zigzag cobbles to the agora."
Last night I read well into the early hours of the morning, unable to tear myself away from my kindle until the last full stop. An unstoppable and highly original tour de force.

The last book of Mark Haddon’s I read was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - and this is absolutely NOTHING like that. This novel is set in two time periods: modern day and Ancient Greece. Haddon has used the story of Apollonius and Shakespeare’s Pericles and worked them into both timelines. I hadn’t read anything about either of these stories to be honest, but after a quick look on the internet (thank you Wikipedia!) I felt a little better informed - although I do think that you would be able to read the book perfectly well without any knowledge of either Apollonius or Pericles.

This is not a comfortable read at all - abuse and incest feature strongly throughout the modern timeline (in the style of all good Greek Tragedies!). I did think about not continuing with the book at one point because I tend to avoid books with these themes, but the story really drew me in, particularly in the Greek timeline.

The way in which we initially move from modern day to Ancient Greece, using the yacht ‘The Porpoise’ to achieve this, was really cleverly done, I thought. The small parts which featured Shakespeare and his Pericles writing partner George Wilkins, seemed to be only loosely connected, but enjoyable nonetheless.

All in all, I really enjoyed this. I’m glad I stuck with it, because especially (but not exclusively!) in the case of the incest storyline, we really do see the strength of women, even though the men in their lives would want them to be cowed and obedient.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my copy of this book.

I'll start with what it's not. This book is not a quick, easy read - not for someone of my age. When the narrative (which, incidentally, was gripping) jumped from contemporary grief-study to... well, what I can only describe as some sort of mythical, middle-ages-based hero quest, I was flummoxed. I was tempted to give up. But hang on to the (Porpoise's) sails and eventually it starts to make sense. And it's very rewarding when it does. The story, without giving too much away, concerns a family in distress - heavily pregnant mother dies suddenly in plane crash, leaving grieving father behind. The unborn baby survives. That's the contemporary strand of the story. Through the - presumably - imaginati0n of the baby, once she has grown, we are flung back to a world of heroes, adventures, swash-buckling romance. That, one supposes, is how she escapes, and processes, the sheer awfulness of her current situation. The novel deals with loss, grief, obsession, love. It is beautifully written and incredibly cleverly plotted. I'm completely in awe and, once I got over my initial confusion, absolutely loved it.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading The Porpoise, and now that I have finished it, I am still not sure! This is definitely not at all similar to Haddon’s other novels; it can best be described as a Greek tragedy but with a contemporary lens.

Loosely based on the story of Pericles, the novel tells of a rich man’s loss of his wife and his determination to protect his baby daughter at all costs, keeping her sheltered from everyone around her.

The multiple plot lines interweave in a complex manner which means that at times it feels disjointed, but the language is so beautiful and the images so thought-provoking, that the reader forgives this.
I am not sure this novel is for everyone, but it is certainly an experience I would recommend.

I loved “The Curious Incident …” so I was very excited about getting this ARC, but unfortunately, I didn’t like it. It was too weird for me. It contains narratives set in different historical periods and it is supposed to portray the cyclical nature of human beings, but it was too complex for me. The author jumps from one storyline to another, so it is very difficult to follow.

Hugely strange and beautiful. The writing and the descriptions are what it is all about for me in this book, as the different plots weave and wander through myth and reality. Some characters seem important yet fade away, absorbed into the myth, never to reappear again, which seems very odd indeed. Not sure I can fully recommend this if you want a rollicking good read, but if you want to lose yourself in Greek myth and suspend your sense of time, you'll love it. The evil of sexual abuse and incest felt gratuitous by the end tbh, I'm not 100% sure why it was felt this was necessary? Well, yes, I can see where it has its roots in the myth of Pericles but even so. By the end, it had nothing to do with the fullness of the story, and I like my threads to be fully unknotted by the end of the book. So not a 5* this time from me, though I still recommend it.

This started off so well but the story was all over the place and I really had to concentrate to follow where we were and what characters were in that scene. Haddon is a great writer and this was the saving grace of the book as that made me want to continue because of how much I liked his writing.

There were parts of this that I found fascinating, but I thought the overall effect was pretty disjointed and off-putting. I enjoyed the parts dealing with Pericles and his adventures, but again, there seemed to be a disconnect between the different areas of the narrative, with the action jumping around between timelines with little to no explanation. Consequently, I found myself bored in places and completely lost in others. I recognise, however, that there are many for whom this type of feverish/dreamlike narrative structure would really appeal and the line on line prose is often exquisite. For me, I just prefer a little more linearity of plot.
I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.