Normally I love Mark Haddon, but I think the whole Ancient Greece thing made it hard to get through this one. I also loved the premise but it was heavy on Greek mythology, which was tough-just not that into it—which is my own issue and not the books. Smart premise but not for me.

This book is really hard to write a review for because I loved so many aspects of the writing but was completely lost with the actual story. Haddon has a beautiful writing style and I was often captivated by his sentences. There were also a lot of creative uses of Greek myths, but overall, there was no resolution with many of the characters and the jumping back and forth between modern and ancient times caused a lot of whiplash.

I can see why this didn't get great reviews. It's hard to see how the disparate stories tied together and the loose ends were kind of maddening. But I would probably still check out new books from him because I loved the way he writes so much.

I kept putting it off, and when I find I am avoiding reading to avoid a specific book, it is time to DNF it. I was not expecting the abuse and hard topics in this book especially after reading “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.” With everything else going on in life now, I am reading happier books and am unlikely to get back to this one. However, I feel like I have read enough to say that while your miles may vary, I found the plot overly complicated and the abuse unnecessarily detailed. I am not reviewing on GoodReads as I do not review DNFs over there but leave a review here.

My thanks go to Net Galley and Doubleday for this much-buzzed-about novel, and I am sorry it took me so long to plow through it. Haddon is a gifted writer and it shows, yet for me, this one was more pain than gain; I read part of my galley and then, after publication, received an audio version via Seattle Bibliocommons. It’s for sale now.

Our protagonist is Angelica, the only child of the extremely wealthy Phillipe. Her mother, Maya, dies in a plane crash and her father, wild with grief, withdraws from the world. He substitutes Angelica for Maya, sexually molesting her from a very young age; he is magnanimous enough not to “penetrate” her until she is fourteen. What a champ. When she is an adolescent, a handsome young visitor tries to liberate her, but Phillipe makes short work of him.

The story is modeled upon a Greek myth, and a second story is told alternately with Angelica’s, rendering a complex story more so. The prose is beautifully rendered, and I think if I were a student tasked with writing an essay involving allegory in a novel written in the twenty-first century, I might have enjoyed using this one. However, as a popular read it is both largely unpleasant and a great deal of work. The one passage that I found deeply satisfying was around the halfway mark, and it involved the revenge of rape victims.

Those looking for skillfully written literary fiction will likely appreciate the artistry Haddon unspools, but I didn’t find a lot of pleasure in reading it.

Warning: pedophilia, incest and abuse

This experimental take on short stories bound together by the the theme of surviving woman. Strong women. Women overcoming. Persisting. Haddon twists tragedy, revenge and love and old Greek mythology with beautifully dark imagery and a double narrative.

There are those who say that there are only so many stories, that the myriad tales we tell are all variations on just a few themes. Even so, there is something truly remarkable that can happen when a writer takes it upon themselves to reinterpret or reimagine an already-extant story.

Mark Haddon has done just that with his new novel “The Porpoise.” It’s a weird and fantastical take on William Shakespeare’s “Pericles, Prince of Tyre,” itself a story that was a reimagination of a tale that came before. It’s a strange and at times unsettling adventure, one that bounces back and forth through time and operates on multiple, metatextual levels.

It is a story about history, about how truth morphs into myth and how the stories we tell can bleed into the world in which we live. It’s about the agency of women and the ugliness of men, about the consequences of our choices and the meaning of love. There are stretches of swashbuckling derring-do and moments of quiet introspection. It is a tale that shows that isn’t always much difference between the past and the present.

Phillippe is an immensely wealthy man, a 1% of the 1% kind of rich. He is married to a beautiful actress named Maja who is pregnant with his first child, a daughter. A tragic plane crash takes her away from him, though the child survives. He names her Angelique and grows fiercely protective to the point of paranoia … and his love for the child soon becomes something twisted and dark.

As Angelique grows into her teenage years, she begins to suspect that something is wrong with the relationship between herself and her father. And when Darius, the handsome son of one of Phillippe’s associates, turns up at the house, she realizes that she wants something more than can be found within the confines of those four walls.

The story is a reflection of that of Antiochus, a legendary figure whose own dark love is revealed when he crosses paths with the adventurer Appolinus, who would go on to serve as the inspiration for Pericles, Shakespeare’s titular hero.

(Note: Shakespeare actually shows up at one point in the story to take part in a particularly weird scene. No spoilers, but man – strange stuff.)

Darius becomes Pericles, the line between reality and myth blurring to the point of indistinction. We follow Pericles through his many adventures, through his loves and losses and desperate battles for survival. His voyages sit in parallel with the silent desperation of Angelique, struggling to come to terms with the fact that what she considered a home might actually be a prison – in more ways than one.

“The Porpoise” is a deft and beautifully written piece, one that uses its inspiration as a springboard to dive into waters that are deep both narratively and intellectually. There’s a starkness to the story that is juxtaposed by the lushness of the prose; even at the tale’s bleakest, the language is captivating and compelling.

As a lover of Shakespeare (and of the Hogarth Shakespeare series of Bard adaptations, into whose midst “The Porpoise” would seamlessly slide, by the way), I’m forever fascinated by these sorts of adaptations. The universality of the stories being told is inescapable in its resonance. Even if there are only so many stories, Shakespeare put his mark on a lot of them … and now Mark Haddon has put his mark on Shakespeare.

Some might struggle with the darkness, both overt and subtle, that bubbles to the surface throughout this book. And there’s no denying that the story gets challengingly bleak at points. However, that unsettling quality, that sense of the sinister, the shadowy evil dressed in deluded trappings of love – it is gut-punch powerful in a way that lodges itself in the memory.

Haddon is unafraid to explore complicated themes in his work; his grasp of the human condition’s complexity is one of his greatest gifts as a writer. He reimagines a legend, a mythic figure whose tale has gone through multiple iterations over the course of centuries, and uses it to reflect on some of the more unpleasant realities of the modern world. By moving back and forth between now and then, between the stark truth of the present and the mythic mists of antiquity, he brings forth truth.

The human soul is a prism through which love can shine. But when that soul is cracked or broken, so too are the feelings that are projected through it. Love is something to which all mankind aspires, but there are variations that are not so welcome. What Haddon does with “The Porpoise” is confront us with that variance; some love is pure, yes, but some love … some love is anything but.

“The Porpoise” is a striking and visceral reading experience, an ambitious work that places perspective on our passions and dives deep into the power of myth. Who we are shapes how we love … or even if we can love. Weird and twisting and packed with marvelous detail and unsettling power, this is a truly challenging – and truly exceptional – book.

She never fights, never complains. She allows these things to happen, and the gap between acceptance and encouragement is a very narrow one. The longer it goes on the more she feels like an accomplice.

The novel begins with tragedy, when Philippe’s pregnant wife dies in a plane crash, the baby miraculously survives. Growing up, she is denied nothing but her father is a sun that will consume and burn her with his attentions, his warped love. He justifies his abuses, and Angelica doesn’t know enough of the world, sheltered by her father, to know any better… until Darius. “she knows little of the world and it is often hard to recognize stories when you find yourself inside them”, it is her dream that Darius will take her away, drunk on his attention she will find a way to confide in him. But they have underestimated daddy’s jealousy and rage. She finds other ways to escape, into silence, refusal, disengaging.

The story transitions and Darius is on the run, Philippe is a wealthy, powerful man whose reach is far. He takes to the sea upon The Porpoise accompanied by his friends Helena, Marlena and Anton while avoiding those who would kill him, not much of the hero Angelica needed. There is something strange afoot, lulled to sleep when they wake the ship has changed drastically and there is a strange, dangerous tattooed man abroad. They are no longer in their world, their time. In this Shakespearean tale based on Pericles, we are crashing into the mythology, but then flash back to Angelica and she is reading the very tale that his life has morphed into. Is this all her fantasy? Honestly, I am not sure. Is that meant to be the thread?

Now we are with Pericles/Darius, and it can be a challenge because I was immersed in the present, disgusted by Philippe, hopeful that Angelica would escape and not into silence nor through denying herself sustenance. It is the only revolt she has, for now. Shakespeare enters the novel too, and we ponder if it was he who ‘turned Appolinus into Pericles’ or was it George Wilkins? Let’s focus on terrible George, by the way, and how he treats women. George, the debauched man, frequenter of brothels, who will soon be dead and have to face quite a surprise in the afterlife. “for years everything has been traveling steadily towards this terrible moment”, and how just! I enjoyed this part of the novel immensely.

It was difficult at first to dig into Pericles as he arrives in Tarsus at first, but it began to flow even if sometimes the jumping through stories and time had me lost. I had to avoid interruptions while reading to keep everything straight. It is adventurous, there is mutiny, rescues, a princess fished out of the sea, births, deaths and women suffering. It is a dark novel, because it begins with rape, no matter how you try to define it. I don’t see her as an accomplice, not at all. Angelica’s insight is vital, the dawning of how wrong what her father does to her is told in her hunger to leave with Darius, her absenting her own body too. I still feel I lost Angelica’s story, even though I can make loose connections throughout Pericles’s tale, still I wanted to focus more on her. This is a unique book, even if I felt as if I was slipped something while reading a modern tale that suddenly changed.

Out now

Doubleday Books

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The Porpoise by Mark Haddon is a novel following three stories in different time periods, all with a common narrative. Mr. Haddon is an award winning English novelist.

Maja, a famous actress, died in a horrible plane crush which only Angelica survived as she had to be cut out of her mother’s womb. Angelica’s father, Phillipe, is rich and powerful, as she grows up he starts abusing Angelica, locking her out of society. To cope, the poor girl starts reading literature, preferring the old stories. A young man tries to rescue Angelica, but due to a terrible incident she closes herself off completely to the outside world, merging her reality with the stories she read.

The narrative than changes to different worlds, which just manage to, maybe, touch one another but then pull back.

According to the snippets I’ve read, The Porpoise by Mark Haddon is supposed to be a reworking of the story of Appolonius and of William Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Since I didn’t read either of those works, I don’t have the background to say whether or not the author hits his mark, but I certainly enjoyed the book.

This book should be read carefully and with attention, the author constructed the book in a very clever way which is easy to miss in an unconventional way. This is still, however, a strange book, it starts out very interesting, than to a point where you consider whether you want to even finish reading it, and by the end you’re hooked and enjoying the journey.

Frankly, I’m not sure I understood everything the author meant to for me to understand, but in enjoyed the writing and the plot. There is tragedy, justice, revenge and retribution all seen from a modern day perspective and a twist. The multiple narratives sometimes left me wondering what’s happening, but I quickly caught on.

This is a good book, but an uncomfortable, dark, read, as much as it is rich and beautiful narrative. You can skip the disturbing parts (even though they aren’t very graphic) without losing any of the impact.

Published by Doubleday on June 18, 2019

It would be difficult for a novel to be more determinedly literary than The Porpoise. Fortunately, the novel manages to be literary without becoming pretentious. Much of the plot tracks Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a play based on the Greek legend of Apollonius of Tyre. The play was at least partially written by Shakespeare (royalty goes mad, so you know it’s Shakespeare). Shakespeare’s ghost appears as a character in The Porpoise, as does the tormented ghost of the play’s likely co-creator, George Wilkins.

Before it morphs into a story of the ancient world (and a lesser story about the ghosts of the creators of that story), the plot echoes Nabokov’s Lolita. Unlike Lolita, however, the young protagonist in The Porpoise is not a seductress, but a victim. The victimization of women and the possibility of empowerment through struggle is, in fact, the thread that ties the storylines together.

The most vital characters in both stories are women. In the modern world, Angelica is cut from the womb of an actress who dies in a plane crash. The actress’ wealthy husband grieves his loss but views his daughter as a marvel. Philippe is tormented by the fear that in his own despair, he will be unable to make his daughter happy.

This seems like the opening to a sweet but melancholy story. Not long into the narrative, however, Philippe becomes creepy. “When does Philippe’s touching turn from innocence into something more sinister?” That sentence telegraphs what is to come.

But Philippe is wealthy and he cannot imagine that there will be any consequence for behavior that he considers to be his right. As she grows into her teen years, Angelica knows that “the law bends before wealth.” The ability of the wealthy (or royalty, in the Pericles story) to live without fear of consequences is one of the novel’s timely themes.

The notion that the wealthy are different (or believe themselves to be) is played out in different ways. One of the most interesting moments in the book comes when Pericles, who has always believed in his ability to shape his own destiny, realizes that he was deluded by the advantages that accompanied his position. When an uncontrollable tragedy strikes his life, he comes to “finally understand that what he thought was weakness in others is not weakness at all; it is simply the structure of the world.” His wife, after an equal tragedy, has a similar epiphany: “Everyone inhabits a different world.” Perhaps the novel and play reveal that we all inclined to live inside our own heads, and that it may require a tragic event to make us recognize how much we have in common with others who are less fortunate.

Given Philippe’s wealth and power, the only person who tries to help Angelica is a young man named Darius. He pays a price for trying. The story diverts from Angelica’s plight to follow Darius as he hitches a ride on a restored yacht called The Porpoise that is being delivered by his friend Helena. Somehow Darius finds himself transformed into Pericles, the Prince of Tyre. In the Shakespeare/Wilkins play, Antiochus is engaged in an incestuous relationship with his daughter — the bridge that connects the two stories.

Pericles is being pursued by an assassin who wants to keep Pericles from spreading the truth about Antiochus (a circumstance similar to one that Darius briefly occupies). Pericles eventually takes a wife who apparently dies while giving birth to Marina. In his grief, Pericles seems to lose touch with his sanity. But the wife is not dead. After being sealed in a coffin and dumped into the sea, she has survival adventures of her own. She uses her wits to adapt and make a new life.

Late in the book, Marina makes her own difficult journey, gaining strength through adversity while becoming disgusted with a pampered friend’s “need for comfort and luxury, her desire to be liked, her affected weakness.” Events in the novel suggest that she has embodied the spirit of the goddess Diana, the deadly hunter, master of woodland creatures and protector of women giving birth.

Female empowerment (and its resistance by males) is the novel’s primary theme. Pericles wonders how, after his father’s death and in his absence, his sisters could possibly rule a city. A man who intends to kill a female child is frightened by the power of women when he encounters Diana (“The world turned upside down; the weak given power.”). Wilkins is haunted in death by all the women he abused during his life (“to discover that the sex too weak to have dominion in the physical world are possessed of demonic powers in the other is hard to bear”).

While male characters disparage the weakness of women (and in turn are frightened by their strength), it is women to whom they turn when they need care. Pericles’ wife, in her reborn life, is tired of caring for men: “she is tired of being the first port of call.” She is also tired of feeling threatened by men. She knows that the ability to read and write is not enough to make her safe. Yet at the end of the novel, she cannot turn away an injured man in need, a man she does not yet recognize, because the most damaged of men still have a soul.

The story depends heavily on coincidence, but coincidence in a Shakespeare play is usually evidence of fate. While the ending of the Pericles story is untold, events that shape the ending a reader might imagine are rooted in fate. The ending of the modern story, which ties the goddess Dianne to Angelica, might also be ascribed to fate. The ending is a surprise, but perhaps believers in fate won’t find it surprising at all.

Oddly, I started out liking the modern story more than the ancient one, in part because the shift to Pericles is jarring. By the end, I was quite taken with the ancient story and thought that the drama was milked out of the modern one. Angelica’s story is sad but a bit forced, while the reimagining of Pericles is fascinating. Both stories are nevertheless told in lush prose and the interwoven plots have all the excitement, tragedy, and insight that fans of literature love.

RECOMMENDED

Thank you NetGalley and Doubleday for an Advanced Reader's Copy of this book. This was such a unique book. This was two stories of Apollonious and Shakespeare's Pericles. The way Haddon melds these stories and retells this one is quite excellent. I found myself turning the pages quickly, I loved it so much. Wonderful storytelling.

This book started off really great. It’s not an easy book to read by any means. A lot of unpleasant things happen, and it’s definitely kind of difficult to get through. But it felt like the kind of family drama I occasionally like to read. And then it got weird. When a book parallels a classic or a legend, I don’t usually expect them to blend together so heavily. In this case, it was a bit confusing, and not in a good way. There are still a few storylines I’m not quite sure I totally grasped. The story splits in two about a third of the way through the book: the contemporary tale we start with, and its ancient Greek counterpart. And, per usual, there was one I liked better than the other (the modern story), and kept just wanting to get back to it. I had already grown so invested in that story, I had a hard time caring much about the other.

While I didn’t totally love the structure of this novel, I did really love the writing. It is the kind of writing that probably isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but I thought it fit the story – the modern part of it, at least – perfectly. It was just simplistic enough to let the characters and plot shine through, but interesting enough to showcase some serious talent.

Greek mythology, Shakespeare, Appolonius....all of these should be read, studied, analyzed before picking up The Porpoise. Since it's been MANY years since my college literature days, The Porpoise bored me a bit.

Maybe it's the reworking of classics. There is a reason that those stories have lasted so long and have continued to influence people. However - maybe it's time to stop doing that.

New ideas. Fresh plots. Different stories. That's why I read. Not to rehash tragedy and revenge stories written hundreds and hundred of years ago.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

What a thrilling, immersive and surprising piece of work this is. I don’t know Pericles, but I didn’t feel it mattered as I lost myself in the adventures, mysteries and gorgeous descriptions of the book. Did it all hang together? Not entirely. Did I mind? Not really. The writing and richness were satisfying enough.

I loved Haddon’s previous book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. The Porpoise could not be more different from that one. However, I still enjoyed The Porpoise. There were times when the switch between the different storylines was a bit awkward or hard to follow and I would have like for Angelica’s story to be more integrated in the later parts of the book. At the beginning it felt like this was the main story and then it became an afterthought. Perhaps this was intentional, but it took away from the overall enjoyment of the book for me. Still all in all I found this to be an enjoyable read.

"He does not understand yet that there are things that keep one awake at night which are more terrifying than pirates or reefs, and cannot be avoided by dousing of lights at dusk and the possession of a good map. He does not understand yet that sometimes the monster is other people, sometimes the monster squats unseen inside one's own heart, and sometimes the monster is the brute fact of time itself."

I've read and liked Mark Haddon's previous books, so I was looking forward to reading this book. Alas, it's wildly different from [book:The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time|1618] so if you're picking this up in the hopes that it will be similar, I want to make sure to caution you. I also want to mention that this book has a lot of violence in it. Murder, incest, lots of fighting, etc. If I hadn't received an ARC, I likely would have put it down. I think the blurb downplays the plot quite a bit. I don't want to give away too much but please beware of trigger warnings. Also, about a third of the way in, one of the characters morphs and it becomes a Greek tale, and then Shakespeare also comes into the story so it has three interweaving stories, making the whole plot quite surreal.

Having said all of this, I decided to persevere, and by the time I finished the book, I was quite interested in the fates of the characters. The writing was good, some of the characters were interesting, but in the end this book has way too many triggers and way too much violence for me.

Thank you to Doubleday Books & Netgalley for allowing me to read this in exchange for an honest review!

I have not read any other books by Mark Haddon, but I have heard good things. I had no idea he wrote a new one, and I figured I would give it a shot.
Unfortunately, I really didn't care for it. His writing his great. I had no issues with his writing. It was the story. I was expecting something different than this, and it just didn't click with me. The characters were all very bland, and I wasn't connected enough with them to care what happens. The ending wasn't anything special.
This novel definitely had a lot of potential, and I'm sure a lot of people will love it. I personally really liked the beginning. It started out with a plane crash, and I was hooked. I think, for me, I compared it too much to The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, and I am in love with that book. You can't even compare them, but I did for some reason. I felt like the writing was very blunt, and it had the mythology vibes, but I just didn't like it as much.
I am definitely going to give this author another shot, because I did like his writing style so much.

I couldn’t finish this due to subject matter . Although Mr. Haddon is a fabulous writer and this book grabs you from the start I was unable to deal with the subject . Sorry

Mark Haddon's The Porpoise is a complex novel that builds off of the Greek mythological tale of Antiochus. Haddon builds layers - both real and mythic - in his novel, which will challenge readers looking for a more straightforward and heartwarming narrative in line with The Curious Incident of Dog in the Night-Time. This isn't to take away from what Haddon accomplishes in The Porpoise. It's more to explain that his newest work is a far departure from his best-known work, and those looking for something in the same vein will be disappointed. The Porpoise is its own creation.

Father Phillppe's obsession with his daughter Angelique devastates readers, who will root for the motherless protagonist. The novel lives both in the past and in the present. It navigates universal themes of love and family and the tests of those bonds. It's an ambitious novel that mostly hits the mark.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Doubleday, and Mark Haddon for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review. The publication date for this novel is June 18, 2019.

What a confusing and wandering novel. I had very high expectations for Haddon's book. I was horrified and engrossed in the parent/child abusive relationship. Unfortunately the multiple other stories based in mythology totally distracted me as a reader and caused me to feel disconnected and wanted to hurry back to the main story line. I feel general readers will bring the book back to the Library half read.