The Porpoise by Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,seems eager to shed his “child-friendly reputation”, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer. His “wondrous” new novel is a “violent, all-action thrill ride” inspired by Shakespeare’s Pericles. In the play, a Phoenician prince goes on the run after revealing a Syrian king’s incestuous relationship with his daughter. Haddon sets his version – at least to begin with – in the present, with the Syrian king reimagined as a “super-rich businessman”, Philippe, who raises his daughter, Angelica, as his sexual plaything. Forty pages in, Philippe murders a young playboy named Darius in a fit of jealousy after he dares to catch Angelica’s eye. At this point, The Porpoise moves into a “foggy” dream-like state. Darius “literally” turns into Pericles; there are shipwrecks, combat scenes and nick-of-time escapes set in the classical past, as well as a stop-off in Jacobean London.

The Porpoise eschews the “coherence of a conventional novel”, said Justine Jordan in The Guardian. The narrative “dances on the threshold between reality and imagination” (the Pericles sections may simply be Angelica’s daydreams), and the novel “often hints at its own construction”. And yet it is rescued from seeming like a “metatextual game” by the “extraordinary force and vividness of Haddon’s prose”. The keynote here seems to be “escalating atrocity”, said David Grylls in The Sunday Times: after a “hideous plane crash”, we then get “smashed arms, severed tongues, skinned senators and wolves yanking out a man’s lungs”. “The cumulative effect is of overkill.” In Shakespeare’s play, there is redemption amid the horror, but “Haddon goes mainly for the horrors”.