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Summary
Summary
In a bravura feat of storytelling, Mark Haddon calls upon narratives ancient and modern to tell the story of Angelica, a young woman trapped in an abusive relationship with her father. When a young man named Darius discovers their secret, he is forced to escape on a boat bound for the Mediterranean. To his surprise he finds himself travelling backwards over two thousand years to a world of pirates and shipwrecks, of plagues and miracles and angry gods. Moving seamlessly between the past and the present, Haddon conjures the worlds of Angelica and her would-be savior in thrilling fashion. As profound as it is entertaining, The Porpoise is a stirring and endlessly inventive novel from one of our finest storytellers.
Author Notes
Mark Haddon is the author of the bestselling novels The Red House and A Spot of Bother. His novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction and is the basis for the Tony Award-winning play. He is the author of a collection of poetry, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea , has written and illustrated numerous children's books, and has won awards for both his radio dramas and his television screenplays. He teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and lives in Oxford, England.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The latest from Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) is an artfully crafted story of layered lives. Uberwealthy Philippe finds out his wife, Maja, has died in a plane crash, though the baby she was carrying, Angelica, is saved. Philippe's grief takes a darker, sexual turn, and he begins molesting Angelica when she's a young girl. Their reclusive existence is eventually intruded upon by a young man named Darius, who arrives with a business proposition for Philippe when Angelica is 16. Angelica sees the young man as her savior, until Philippe attacks him and drives him away; Darius escapes to a ship called the Porpoise. The tale then shifts into mythical territory, transmogrifying Darius into Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and his adventures-mostly mirroring those depicted in the play Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which is at least partially attributed to Shakespeare-take him through ocean voyages and fierce battles. As the novel moves back and forth between present and past, female characters of Pericles's story are sometimes depicted as distant relatives of Angelica, and her modern-day traumas with Philippe are woven throughout, building both story lines to startling, disparate conclusions. Haddon's ambitious tale captures the ethos of tragic Shakespearean vibrations and the tangle of lives that magically intersect. The prose is exquisite and elevates this story that blends reality and mythology to great effect. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Haddon's (The Pier Falls and Other Stories, 2016) new novel works on multiple levels: as an entertaining adventure, a creative patchwork of an ancient story's many manifestations, and an exploration of how women suffer when men control their fates. A pregnant woman dies in a plane crash, but her baby, Angelica, survives and grows up in luxury, although her father, Philippe, sexually abuses and isolates her, and the staff on his English estate are little help. An attempted rescuer, the son of Philippe's business associate, is attacked by Philippe and flees for his life. Aboard the Porpoise, an oceangoing yacht, the young man's journey turns fantastical as he transforms into Pericles, Prince of Tyre, hero of the Shakespearean play, whose story parallels the modern-day situation. The settings are colorfully rendered, and the fast-paced action is occasionally disorienting as scenes alternate between Pericles' quasi-Greek world, a gritty Jacobean London, and Angelica's traumatic life. Considerable attention is paid to the viewpoints of Pericles' abandoned wife and daughter. Playful yet unsettling, Haddon's tale offers timeless themes and should particularly interest aficionados of myths and legends.--Sarah Johnson Copyright 2019 Booklist
Guardian Review
This stunning novel based on the legend of Pericles navigates myth, imagination and the power of storytelling The two novels Mark Haddon published in the decade following The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time , A Spot of Bother and The Red House , were both contemporary domestic dramas. Brisk, incisive, and unsparingly honest about family dynamics, they were eminently readable; but as Haddon put it in a recent interview, when you consider the wide-open possibilities of the novel as a form, they were "a bit like having the Millennium Falcon but only using it for going to Sainsbury's". His 2016 short-story collection The Pier Falls was a revelation: it blasted into space and followed Victorian explorers into the jungle; injected Greek myth with savage realism in "The Island", and in "Wodwo" brought the medieval mystery of Gawain and the Green Knight into the present day. The Porpoise gloriously expands the restless, visionary spirit of those tales. It is a version of Pericles , with a daughter abused by her father, another daughter lost and in danger, missing mothers and a man on the run who begins his story as an adventuring hero and ends it a broken wanderer. It spreads itself across two realities, opening among the contemporary elite as Philippe, whose family has been "part of a global aristocracy" since Hellenistic times, raises his daughter Angelica as his sexual plaything. "She is made from his body ... How could there be a boundary of any kind between them?" Angelica's mother died in the plane crash that triggered her birth; she is utterly isolated by wealth and rootlessness. Though they live in south-east England, "Beyond those dark hills right now it might as well be Nunavut. It might as well be the Skeleton Coast. Roasted hulks and sun-leathered corpses. It might as well be Pentapolis or Ephesus." In the play co-written by Shakespeare, Pericles is the challenger to an incestuous father. Seeking to marry the king's daughter, he must solve the riddle that encodes her abuse: a "confession hidden in plain sight", similarly insulated by wealth and status. Here Philippe's adversary is Darius, a globe-trotting young playboy - and then the novel shimmers and shifts direction, slipping into a classical past where the historical references of the early sections become vivid reality. We sail with Pericles, prince of Tyre; through feasts and famines, plagues and mutinies, the stories - and after-stories - of his lost wife and child unroll. We also dip into Jacobean London, in a fantastical riff on the death of Pericles 's co-writer George Wilkins, a brutal pimp whose corpse is gleefully urinated on by the women he's abused. This is not a book, then, that aims for the coherence of a conventional novel. The appropriately classical motif of weaving runs throughout, and the stitches at the back of the tapestry are on show. The Porpoise often hints at its own construction, with characters intuiting a significance to events that is just beyond their reach. The different worlds sometimes jut into each other as the narrative dances on the threshold between reality and imagination. Lonely, myth-obsessed Angelica "is both teller and listener. She forgets, sometimes, where the page ends and her mind begins." A Chinese landscape painting, which the artist vanished into after its completion, takes on a talismanic power. But the extraordinary force and vividness of Haddon's prose ensure that The Porpoise reads not as a metatextual game but as a continually unfolding demonstration of the transporting power of stories. Blunt, short sentences brimming with nouns - food, spices, weapons - propel the reader through a landscape vaguely familiar from legend but here brought into crisp focus. The narrative combines chilly omniscience - we are often informed of deaths to come - with an insistence on the limits and vulnerabilities of its human actors, and a second-by-second attention to fleeting detail. This is language that knows how to do things: sail a ship, make a gold buckle, negotiate the tides of the Thames. It's a stunningly effective combination of the quotidian and the mythic that, as in "The Island" or "Wodwo", pins impossibility to the page. At the beginning of his journey, the heroic Pericles "does not understand yet that adventure is the easiest of all challenges". Though it is, undeniably, a rollicking adventure story, like Haddon's short stories The Porpoise is also about humanity stripped down to its starkest elements by forces beyond its comprehension and control; about damage and survival, and the balancing act between the two. Appropriately for a novel inspired by rape, if there is an image that links the various storylines, it is female resistance: a crowd of vengeful revenants in the George Wilkins section, Diana and her companions protecting Pericles' daughter from a would-be assassin. Angelica only has the power of story to help her endure, but Haddon shows just how powerful that is.
Kirkus Review
A labyrinthine narrative that wends its way through classical myth, Shakespearean theater, and childlike fairy tale as it twists toward a tentative contemporary conclusion.British author Haddon has never written anything like the same book twice, but his fourth novel is in some ways even more audacious and ambitious than his breakthrough debut (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, 2003). The plot propels itself forward at a furious clip, yet key characters disappear (and occasionally reappear) as the basic premise hopscotches centuries and countries. It begins with a bang, or rather a crash. A very rich man loses his very beautiful and pregnant wife when the small plane on which he never should have let her fly crashes into farmland, the pilot momentarily distracted by her beauty. A doctor who happens to be passing assists in the birth of her daughter, whose life begins as her mother's ends. The forlorn father can find life's only consolation in his daughter, named Angelica, and they share an incestuously secret life amid "the vapour of fantasy which always surrounds the rich, powerful and reclusive." Angelica has some sense that these intimacies are wrong, a violation, but it is only with the arrival of the modern equivalent of a handsome prince that she feels she needs to escape; she needs this hero to rescue her, for, upon their first meeting, "she is already in thrall to an imagined future in which he takes her away from all this, and the knowledge that the fantasy is ridiculous does nothing to sour its addictive sweetness." The attempted rescue almost results in a murder, but the prince himself escapes. At which point the story shifts to a different father and daughter, a king and a princess, who may well be an earlier incarnation of the same father and daughter. This tale has proven captivating since classical times and was popularly given form in the Shakespearean play Pericles. So Pericles becomes a character in this novel, as does Shakespeare, or perhaps his ghost. Pericles marries the princess and becomes a mourning father whose pregnant wife dies during an ill-advised voyage. Or did she die? The adventures of Pericles consume 14 years of the narrative, in which he grieves his wife and might have to save his own daughter. And Angelica? The novel ends with her yet seems to open into a whole new world.The nature of narrative itself would seem to be the focus here in a novel that challenges readers to connect the multidimensional dots. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) offers an inspired transformation of the Greek tale of Apollonius of Tyre that effectively blends old and new that begins in the present with a small plane crash. The only survivor is Angelica, a newborn pulled from her dying mother's womb. Angelica grows up trapped in an incestuous relationship with her wealthy father and tries to escape with the help of a rich playboy named Darius, but she is thwarted. As Darius flees the island, he changes into Pericles, the prince of Tyre, sailing on the ship Porpoise in an ancient setting. Pericles travels to Tarsus, where he rescues the city, then flees to Pentapolis and marries the king's daughter, Chloe. But tragedy follows Pericles as he's separated from his wife, whom he believes has died in childbirth, and from his infant daughter. The novel concludes by returning to the present, with Angelica brutally facing her responsibilities as a lightning storm exacts a grisly revenge on her father. VERDICT The integration of a modern setting that reverts to ancient times and back again makes for a fascinating read. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 12/3/19.]--Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Flight Maja is thirty-seven weeks pregnant. She would not be allowed on a commercial flight but they have been staying with friends who own a vineyard in Bellevue Champillon and one of the other guests, Viktor, has a Piper PA‑28 Warrior which he intends to fly back to Popham the following morning. His Land Rover is waiting at the airfield and it will be the simplest thing in the world to drop her at the Winchester house en route to the south coast. Her husband, Philippe, does not like placing Maja in the care of another man, let alone one he has met only two days previously, but the jigsaw falls so serendipitously into place that refusal is almost impossible. He will drive to Paris, leave the car at the apartment, take the Eurostar to London and be back in Winchester a day later. Besides, Maja enjoys small planes. Travel has become too easy. You fall asleep in Istanbul and wake up in Beijing. She likes to watch the miles tick by--river deltas, irrigation circles, clouds spooling into existence downwind of peaks. She retains a vivid memory of flying over Oslofjord as a girl, island after island, summerhouses, quays, boats, the sun's reflection skimming the water, some revelation which lay just beyond words about the relation between scale and escape and the surface of the earth. In addition, the morning sickness which persisted unnaturally late into her pregnancy has finally faded; she is experiencing the fabled glow and eager to indulge the freedom that comes with it before she devotes her life to a very small and very demanding human being. Philippe's anxiety is justified. Viktor has a Private Pilot's Licence but no Instrument Rating. This wouldn't matter were he travelling with only his nine-year-old son, Rudy. They would head off early and if the weather or other circumstances were to change he could either postpone the flight till the following day or divert to one of his alternates if they were already airborne. But Maja wakes late and takes a long breakfast and packs slowly and has mislaid a coral necklace which, she insists, can be couriered to the UK if and when it is found, but which becomes the object of a painstaking and fruitless search of what is a very large house. Lunch has come and gone by the time she is ready to leave. Were Maja less attractive Viktor would feel no compunction about inconveniencing her but, having been underwhelmed by her performances on screen, he is surprised to find himself in the company of a woman who makes him fifteen again--thick blonde hair, blue, blue eyes, cartoon-pretty, engagingly shambolic, just this side of plump. There is a scar on her cheek, courtesy of a rook which flew in through her bedroom window when she was ten years old. Viktor's infatuation is enjoyable but mildly alarming for a man who is used to having a courtroom, indeed any room, in the palm of his hand. The necklace will be found six months later by the gardener, Bruno, tarnished and grubby in a stand of poplars at the very edge of the property where the Beaufours rarely venture, let alone their guests. The only explanation they will be able to find is that some animal, drawn to the bright colour, has dragged it from the poolside, across the grass and into the trees before realising the pointlessness of the effort. They consider sending it to Winchester but cannot find the appropriate words for the accompanying letter, so it is laid quietly at the back of a drawer where it remains for many years. Viktor rings the airfield to check the weather one final time before they leave the house. The report is not reassuring but he accepts it as a given that they are going to fly. Far from irritating him, he finds to his surprise that the delay has made Maja more endearing. He will not allow himself to appear anxious or ill-prepared in her eyes, so he dons those metaphorical robes which bestow a radiant confidence in the rightness of his own pronouncements, and the clear sky suggests that the weather is as susceptible as any jury to the force of his personality. They walk out onto the tarmac and Rudy climbs into the plane straight away. Maja watches while Viktor performs the external checks, her visible enjoyment of the process reigniting some of the excitement he once felt himself before every flight. He climbs into the cabin through the single door, sits himself in the pilot's seat then helps her in. He leans across her lap to pull the door shut, shows her how the seat belt works and gives her a headset. They refuel then park up into the wind. He puts the brakes on, checks the fuel is drawing from the emptier tank, switches to the fuller and runs through the power checks. Magnetos, carburettor, trim, full and free movement, hatch and harness. They taxi to the runway and wait for a Hawker 600 to take off, bank right and dissolve into the blue. They have not left the ground but Rudy is already asleep in the back seat, lullabied by the rumble and bounce. He is ill at ease in the company of most other children but he is utterly self-sufficient, so this holiday has been, for him, a little heaven during which he has had unrestricted access to a pool, a well-stocked refrigerator with double doors and a set of thirty-two Caran d'Ache coloured pencils with which to continue writing and drawing his cartoon epic The Knights of Kandor. His fondest memory is that of swimming in the rain, having the vacated pool area entirely to himself, the pebbled fizz of the surface and the blue silence under. He goes to a boarding school where he is bullied by the other boys in a way that is too unspecific and too nebulous to complain about but which eats away at him, and there are only three more days of holiday left, so he has made the most of his limited time in Bellevue, going to bed late and rising early. Consequently he is exhausted. But he will not be returning to school. In two hours he will be dead. "Prunay tower. Golf Alpha Sierra at the hold and ready for departure." "Golf Alpha Sierra. Clear to take-off, runway zero one. Wind zero two zero degrees. Five knots." Viktor has become lax recently but because Maja is sitting next to him he goes through the emergency protocols, reciting the mantra in his head as they accelerate along the runway. "If I have an engine failure on the ground, I close the throttle and come to a halt. If I get an engine failure when I'm just airborne but have sufficient room I close the throttle and land back on the runway. If I can't land on the runway I pick the safest area within thirty degrees left and right of the centre line and land in it." Thirty miles per hour, forty, fifty . . . They take off and Viktor turns on track as they climb. He'll head north-west to Le Touquet then north along the coast to Cap Gris-Nez before crossing the Channel to the Dover beacon. They level out at six thousand feet and Maja starts talking about riding a horse called Bombardier on the South Downs--the Clarendon Way, Ashley Down, Beacon Hill . . . It's superficial chatter but she seems satisfied with a few well-placed noises of agreement and he likes the sound of her voice. Finally she stops fighting the roar of the engine and gives herself over to looking down at the landscape so that he is free to turn every now and then and imagine what she looks like naked. Five thousand feet below it's a jumbled parquet of fields, half ploughed, half green, patches of forest over Saint-Gobain and Noyon, the fat snake of the Somme looping down towards Amiens. The sky is cloudier now, the blue fading, the air a little bumpier. He radios Lille Information for a heads‑up. A few clouds at a thousand feet, broken cloud at fifteen hundred, overcast at five. Not perfect but they're heading towards Le Touquet anyway so there are no significant decisions to be made and Maja is talking again, about her husband's shortcomings this time, in a way which is sad and funny and surprisingly kind, so that Viktor feels drawn into a circle of confidence from which he has been excluded all week, a sensation so intensely pleasurable when combined with their physical closeness that he pays too little attention to the slowly deteriorating weather. Over Abbeville the cloud thickens unexpectedly. He loses visual contact with the ground and finds that his forward visibility has been reduced to the point where he can no longer distinguish the horizon. He knows precisely what he should do at this point--carefully execute a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and get out of what is a potentially disastrous situation as swiftly as he can. If Maja were noticeably concerned then this is precisely what he would do, but far from understanding the danger they are now in, she seems entranced. "You can imagine it's Turkey down there. Or Finland. Very Antoine de Saint-Exupéry." It is the most foolish thing he has ever done. Their safety--her safety, Rudy's safety--is more important than any other consideration, but there is some caveman part of his brain which is profoundly averse to being seen as less than competent, by anyone, let alone by a woman, and least of all by a woman he finds this attractive. The very act of turning over these thoughts in his mind has postponed the evasive action he should have taken by five, then ten, then fifteen seconds and convinced him that since he's on track he will hold his course and, fingers crossed, soon emerge from the other side of the cloud. There is an American study everyone quotes during PPL training which says that the average life expectancy of a pilot who flies into cloud with no instrument training is ninety seconds. It had always seemed to him like a tactical exaggeration. Keep out. Here be monsters . Or a measure perhaps of the number of idiot farmers in rural Kansas who used crop-dusters like quad bikes. It is the speed with which he must read and react to the instruments which shocks him, and the difficulty of ignoring the messages coming from his inner ear. Maja gazes out of the window, unperturbed. It is less than three minutes since they entered the cloud. He is shockingly tired and starting to feel dizzy, his brain so desperate for some fixed point to contradict all these deceptive signals of lift and twist and fall and yaw that he is starting to hallucinate dark shapes ahead. The aircraft pitches and banks. He over-corrects. He needs to lose height. Maybe he can get out from under the cloud cover. A glimpse of the ground is all he needs. He loosens the throttle a little and gently pushes the yoke forwards. Two thousand feet, a thousand feet, eight hundred. Were he not concentrating so hard on keeping the plane level and straight he might realise the elementary mistake he is making. The altimeter is set to sea level. He is not over the sea. He is over the land. Four minutes. Five. The cloud is not clearing. There is a very real possibility that they are going to crash. He is unconcerned about his own death, but he cannot bear the thought that he will kill his own son, he cannot bear the thought that he will kill a beautiful woman and her unborn child. In his dream Rudy is playing with his imaginary friend, Babu. They are back at Bellevue. It is night-time and they have taken triangles of La Vache Qui Rit from the fridge and made themselves big tumblers of grenadine and turned on the pool lights so that the water is a turquoise slab of liquid light swaying in the dark. Maja looks across and sees tears rolling down Viktor's face. He says, in an oddly formal voice, "I really am so very, very sorry about this." She is sick with fear for perhaps ten seconds then the fog in front of the plane darkens for the merest moment before they strike the side of a grain silo. They are travelling at seventy miles per hour. The silo is empty so they rip through the corrugated iron. The Perspex windscreen splits and pops out of its frame, the snapped edge taking Viktor's head clean off. They hit the far wall of the silo, rip through that in turn then plough, nose first, into the hard earth. The wheels collapse, the plane pitches forward and the engine block is punched backwards, crushing Maja's legs. By chance a German doctor, Raphael Bhatt, is driving slowly along a small country road between Gapennes and Yvrench when he sees a green starboard wing light descending to the left of the car. The fog is so thick that he has no idea whether the plane is a Cessna or an Airbus. He hits the brakes for fear that the plane is going to veer across the road, but the light shoots ahead, lower than tree height now, and vanishes. He does not know the area well but he is fairly sure that there are no airfields nearby. He thinks he hears an explosion of some kind but it is possible that he has imagined it. He slows to a crawl and waits for the glow of flames, but there is only the road dissolving into the whiteness ahead. He wonders whether he really saw it, the way one does after extraordinary events which leave no mark on one's surroundings. He picks up speed. After a few hundred metres he takes a lefthand turning onto a dirt track which leads to a dilapidated farm-house. A rusted tractor. A stack of old tyres. He suspects that he has come to the wrong place, that the plane landed somewhere else or gained altitude and is now five miles away. Nevertheless he gets out of the car. The only thing he can hear is the fog- muffled grunting of many pigs, the smell of whose shit is almost overpowering. The door of the farmhouse opens, a triangle of light cuts across the muddy yard and a portly woman trots towards him-- bun, floral apron, slippers-- shouting, "Venez! Venez!" as if she were relieved to find that he has finally arrived. She beckons him round the side of the farmhouse whose entire gable wall consists of black plastic sheeting held in place by a grid of wooden battens. An intruder floodlight comes on as they jog beneath it. The woman's husband stands facing them, immobile, pointing a beam of torchlight to his left like a bored usherette at the cinema. They turn the corner of a barn. Excerpted from The Porpoise: A Novel by Mark Haddon All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
