The Porpoise

Curious Incident master Haddon updates the story of widower Antiochus, whose incestuous love for his daughter is revealed by Appolonius of Tyre, seen centuries later as Shakespeare's Pericles. Here, filthy-rich Philippe loses his wife in a plane crash and obsesses over daughter Angelique, whom Darius--visiting Philippe on business--tries to rescue. Even as Darius shape-shifts into Pericles, Angelique wrestles for some measure of control.

April 1, 2019
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.

April 15, 2019
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.

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April 15, 2019
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)