The Porpoise

I have enjoyed many of Mark Haddon’s books so was looking forward to reading The Porpoise.
The opening chapters were very unsettling and took me well outside my comfort zone. As the story progressed it became more strange and weird – a rollicking voyage through time. Apparently based on the story of Pericles Prince of Tyre,
a well written tale but I did not like all the to-ing and fro-ing through time.

My thanks to the publisher and to Netgalley for the opportunity to review this book.

A complex, brilliant tour de force, entrancing writing which will sweep you into this multi layered world of myth, quest and adventure. I don't want to say more for fear of ruining this absolute treat.

This is a beautiful, fascinating read. I loved the opening, then was jolted hard into the world of myth. I nearly stopped reading it was such a shock. But I'm so glad I kept going. I ended up hardly putting it down. The writing is perfect - short, sparse sentences that are so evocative. I was lost in the hazy world of myth/reality. Best book I've read in a while.

When you think of previous books by Mark Haddon, ancient Greece doesn't instantly spring to mind.

So you start this book and it jumps along quite normally, then wham, it is the story of Pericles! Very, very odd but actually quite clever.

Yes, there are a few oddities thrown in along the way but it is worth a read. A brave release, which won't be to everybody's taste but I would say you won't know if you don't try!

This is a retelling of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, the play which Shakespeare collaborated with George Wilkins. It opens with a young glamorous and very pregnant film star dying in an air crash but being delivered of a daughter before she dies. The bereaved husband and father looks after the girl but starts to sexually abuse her. As she gets older a suitor guesses at the abuse and the father sends an assassin to silence him. He escapes and sails away on the Porpoise and as they cross the Bay of Biscay they morph into the Greek legend. Will and George make cameo appearances. The Greek legend follows the story of Pericles fairly closely, the modern story comes to a darker conclusion. Whatever you were expecting after The Curious Incident, it probably wasn't this, but its a terrific read..

Modern day – a man loses his wife in a plane crash, but his unborn daughter survives. He becomes obsessed with Angelica, his obsession surpassing society’s acceptable boundaries, leading to incest. Trapped by her father’s wealth and isolated from society due to his refusal for her to engage with the outside world, Angelica is desperate for rescue.

Enter Darius, son of a business colleague of her father. A chance meeting leaves him with a compelling need to see Angelica again – however, an attempted rescue leads to a murder attempt on his life.

Escaping on a boat, Darius’s life is transformed into that of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (worth a quick look at the story on Wikipedia if you’re not familiar!)… and so the reader is transported to ancient times, more stories of grief, betrayal, loves lost and new lives found.

A remarkable and enthralling story, which had me enchanted. Very highly recommended.

Mark Haddon has written widely differing kinds of novels and here we find the sort of experimental treatment displayed his short story collection ‘The Pier Falls and other Stories', which marked such a departure from his previous best-selling work.
Tragedy, revenge and retribution are given a spell-binding modern day twist in this fantastical re-working of an ancient Greek myth.
Haddon is a master storyteller and his use of imagery is sublime (e.g. 'time has turned to toffee'). However, be warned that with its disturbing sub-plot of paedophilia and incest, this is a challenging double narrative which could leave you well out of your comfort zone.

I started this book yesterday morning and finished it at 2.00 this morning. Haddon is an incredible writer. His book of short stories, The Pier Falls is one of the most powerful and amazing things I have ever read, and this deeply unsettling novel seems to take over where the collection left off. It is like a maze of stories that interweave, both with characters and time lines and narrative arcs. The book starts one way and you are sure that you know where it's going and then it takes you on a mad, roller coaster ride that flings you as the reader all over, but never lets go of you for an instant. It's difficult in terms of subject matter, brutal and dark and fierce, but brilliant and utterly absorbing. It's a book that will stay with me for a very long time. I wish I could read it all over again for the first time.

I was engrossed in the plot at the beginning but then it swerved into the story of Pericles and I was completely thrown. (I had not read any reviews or blurbs and was not familiar with the srory of Pericles). However, I persisted and although I found it confusing in parts, I was swept away by the language and imagery, the mythology and the links between the past and present stories. The ending was perfect. The whole tale is told in the present tense which makes you breathless as it bowls along. There is no pause between the various storylines so I had to backtrack often when I realised that it had changed, but I am not going to deduct a star for this small annoyance. I had not read any of Mark Haddon's work before except Curious years ago, and when I looked at his list of work it seems very varied and maybe a little experimental, so I may have a look at some of them. Also, he helpfully lists his sources at the end of the book so I will be looking up the stories of Pericles and maybe re-reading this afterwards. I think this is an amazing and unique book.

Weird but astonishingly beautiful!

Readers are warned this is not anything like The Curious Incident of The Dog In the Night-Time. However, the writing alone should encourage you to read this very bizarre twisted plot.

Maja is thirty-seven weeks pregnant when she leaves her husband Philippe to fly from Bellevue Champillon back to the couple’s home in Winchester. Unfortunately, the pilot of the Piper Warrior is not fully qualified and he becomes disorientated, causing them to crash into a farm building. Maja dies, but thanks to a doctor who happens to see the plane crash, manages to perform a caesarean, saving the baby’s life.

Philippe cannot come to terms with losing Maja and turns to his daughter, Angelica to take her place. The staff can do nothing to stop this relationship as Philippe’s bodyguard who will go to extraordinary lengths to protect his employer. When Darius, brings a set of paintings for Philippe, Angelica manages to somehow portray her relationship with her father. Darius swears he will return to rescue her. However, the rescue is thwarted by Philippe. Darius with the help of his friends, escapes of The Porpoise, an oceangoing yacht

Things change, is it Darius’ imagination or is he really Pericles, Prince of Tyre?

The stories interchange between now and the mythological story of Pericles.

Mark Haddon has a way with words and this story flows like water as it trickles over rocks and then flows into a rushing stream. It’s unique – part mythology, part present day, but there’s something so beautiful about the mix that I was spellbound from the opening sentence.

Treebeard

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

What an amazing book, it confuses and delights in equal measure. The author plays with your ideas of a story plot while urging you to solve the mystery of how the different parts of the story are connected.
You just have to keep reading!

The prose is absolutely beautiful in this meditation on the Pericles story, with its modern-day prologue woven through the text. The ending is absolutely heart breaking. #ThePorpoise #NetGalley

In a world where books seem to leap onto the bandwagon of whatever trend is popular at the moment, Haddon is an author to cherish. From the ground-breaking Curious Incident, to the hilarious Spot of Bother then this lyric tale of a young girl trapped with an obsessive father as she imagines her hero in the tales of her books, everything he writes is different. The plot jumps about and can be difficult to follow in parts but this is a beautifully written novel to savour slowly. Not an easy, or pleasant read in parts, but well worth the effort.

The Porpoise explores the complexities of a young girl’s tormented mind through her love of literature. Having escaped not a plane crash which killed her mother, Marina is brought up by an over-protective father who, whilst indulging her every whim, cannot bear to allow her to be a part of a society outside of the suffocating world in which she is cocooned. With the realisation of her father’s transgressions, Marina seeks the sanctuary of escape.

A plane crashes and a baby born. A dramatic start to a very gripping book. The baby girl grows up in an isolated relationship with her father that is unhealthy and oppressive. A failed rescue leads to a man on the run.
And now time changes and we follow lives of others with all the twists and turns of Greel tragedies.
Cannot say I always understood it but could not put it down and sad when it ended. Just read and lose yourself in the words of this very exciting book.

This is a slow build of sometimes uncomfortable situations, death, adventure and overlapping time zones. A tapestry of threads binds the characters in parallel worlds, where forbidden love and tragedy across land and sea grips the reader. Enchantment and myth jostle with cruelty and abandonment, storms tear worlds apart, but beauty and resilience live on. Vignettes of tender moments stay in my mind’s eye: a stag which stands and watches outside Diana’s temple; the scene on the river where lost souls appear. It is a fantastic read.

‘There was a king’s daughter who married a prince and they loved one another beyond measure. It happened a long time ago and far away and there is nothing to connect that woman to the woman sitting here on the terrace under the vines.
She says, “My name is Emila.”’

If you come to this having read Haddon’s ‘Curious Incident…’ then prepare for something quite, quite different. It takes a brave man to write a novel that takes in incest, Shakespeare’s ghost, Greek myth and female empowerment, and what Haddon has produced here is, for me, a triumph of story telling and emotional integrity. The book opens with a pregnant woman flying home to her husband; the small plane crashes and all aboard are killed but the baby is delivered safely. Anjelica is raised by her uber-rich father Philippe on his estate called Antioch near the town of Winchester (here we get the first faint echo of an overriding mythology that will soon overtake us). As the child grows Philippe starts to abuse here – and yes, I’m afraid the subject matter is suitably grim. In a conspiracy of silence, the entire household carry on as if nothing was happening, until one day a young man called Darius calls on the house to sell to Philippe some Hockney prints of the Grimm fairy tales. He suspects something is amiss and tries to rescue Anjelica, but fails and, wounded, escapes, to be pursued by one of Philippe’s faithful retainers….

I give some detail about how the story starts because, under Haddon’s subtle mastery, it hints at what is to come. Somehow Darius’s flight becomes the story of Pericles (and yes, I would suggest you bone up on your Gower and/or Shakespeare before you read this because it will make so much more sense!) – but in doing so, we are never sure how or why. Is this a dream of Anjelica’s, fond as she is of reading tales of Greek myth? Why do we also get the vignettes of George Wilkins, co-author with Shakespeare of the play ‘Pericles’? In these, the ghost of Shakespeare comes to Wilkins when he dies and escorts him on a boat journey down the Thames. And as the story of Darius truly becomes the story of Pericles, we keep flashing back to the house in Winchester and Anjelica’s story, as she first refuses to speak, and then refuses to eat, becoming more and more ill.

You really just need to immerse yourself in this, and whilst the Pericles story is involving, it is the female characters that Haddon writes that are so striking. Chloe (Thaisa in the original play), Pericles’ wife and Marina, their daughter, have a mystical quality to them that makes them somehow symbols of survival and human kindness. There are so many subtle touches to the story: as a child, Anjelica’s first spoken word is ‘water’, hinting at the story of Marina, the daughter born at sea, that is to come. One of the recurring motifs is that of stories and myth-making, not only as Anjelica reads passages from her books that somehow become passages in the book that we are also reading, but each of the main characters see themselves as part of a story. Words, images, events repeat themselves in magical ways. The whole thing is written in the present tense, which gives the entire unfolding story the sense of fairy tale or myth. The ending is sublimely understated, allowing us to only imagine at the future of the three main characters. But the actual ending of the book returns us to Winchester, and Anjelica and her father, whose story somehow created the myth. It is suitably true to the Pericles story and leaves the reader with a sense of closure, yes, of justice, and a sense of passing from reality to myth.

With every passing page I found myself totally engrossed in this wonder of a book. It is a book about journeys, and love, and trying to find your way home. It is the kind of novel that expects something from a reader, a sense of opening your mind to the power of stories and of words, and I can see why some reviewers have been left a little perplexed. For me, it is undoubtedly one of the best books I’ve read this year so far, and fully keeps my faith in the modern novel. What a joy it is to find writers writing such books. Totally deserving of 5 stars.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)

My thanks to Random House U.K. Vintage Publishing/Chatto & Windus for an eARC via NetGalley of Mark Haddon’s ‘The Porpoise’ in exchange for an honest review.

‘The Porpoise’ is essentially a retelling of the story of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Apollonius/Appolonius). Yet rather than being only set in the ancient world it is blended with a modern-day tale that echoes elements of Pericles’ story with interludes that visit George Wilkins, Shakespeare’s collaborator on ‘Pericles’, at the end of his life in the early 17th Century.

I was not familiar with the source material of the Shakespeare/Wilkins play or the earlier myths though this was no barrier to my enjoyment. I appreciated that in his Author’s Note Haddon provided extensive background and his sources.

This novel is beautifully written, adventurous, multi-layered, complex, and breathtaking in its blending of myth, legend, and literature. Over a day after finishing I find myself feeling stunned.

I am totally in awe of Haddon. It takes great confidence and skill to not only write such elegant prose but to set aside conventions, including movement through time, tackle uncomfortable subjects such as incest and jealousy, while creating a work that while clearly literary remains accessible.

I fell in love with ‘The Porpoise’ and have never read anything quite like it. On completion I immediately bought my own hardback as I certainly want to reread to experience it again and again.

Who would expect a novel, based on the myth of Pericles, to be a page turner? But this is just what Mark Haddon has successfully achieved with this excellent book "The Porpoise". The story starts in the 20th century where a tragedy is about to unfold that changes for ever, the life of Angelique and, Phillippe, her wealthy father. Haddon then seamlessly blends the evolving story into that of Pericles and his endless travels in search of the daughter he once abandoned. Along the way Haddon takes us on a gruesome, but not irrelevant, diversion involving the 16th century and William Shakespeare. At the end of the book all the threads are drawn together, bar one, and that is whether Pericles, Marina and Emilia ever reveal their past lives and so find happiness.. An absorbing and beautifully written book.

A wonderful, evocative novel full of echoes and surprises. The early time shifts were slightly disarming at first but once I was in the swing of them I thought they worked beautifully. I loved the way the stories overlapped and fed into each other.