7: The Porpoise

A book by Mark Haddon

(Please note that the following post includes references to sexual abuse.)

How much do you want to know about a book before you read it? My usual answer would be: “As little as possible, thank you.” In the case of Mark Haddon’s 2019 novel The Porpoise, though, a primer on the play Pericles, Prince of Tyre, written at least in part by William Shakespeare, would have been useful in untangling what is a heady web of a story.

It starts conventionally enough, and in thrilling fashion, with a plane crash. There are two fatalities, including a pregnant Swedish actor named Maja. Her child, Angelica, is successfully delivered in the wreckage and is brought up in palatial isolation by her father, Philippe, an impossibly rich businessman whose grief for his wife mutates into lust for his daughter, which in turn develops into years of shocking sexual abuse. When Angelica is sixteen, a rare visitor comes to their house. “Comically handsome” Darius, the layabout son of an art dealer friend, intuits that all is not well between father and daughter. His attempt to rescue Angelica fails, but he is spared the wrath of Philippe and his henchman after an unlikely escape on the eponymous Porpoise, a 24-meter ship.

Barely 60 pages into the 300ish-page book, Haddon has covered a lot of ground in heart-stopping fashion, and it appears likely the narrative will continue by following the respective threads of Darius and Angelica. Here, though, is where things get, frankly, a little bit weird. After a couple of days on the ship, Darius wakes up to find he has been transported back to ancient times and is now Pericles, Prince of Tyre. The majority of the remainder of the book is concerned with his escapades in the ancient world. And what escapades! The Porpoise is a rollicking, often magical, read. There are assassins, pirates, semi-naked wrestlers, shipwrecks, and goddesses. The story includes love, death, betrayal, entrapment, escape, reunion. The reader is intermittently returned to Angelica’s modern world, and there are also visits to Jacobean London, where George Wilkins, the disreputable co-author of Pericles, is chaperoned to the afterlife by Shakespeare’s ghost.

It was only when I was about halfway through The Porpoise that I realised Haddon was also responsible for 2003’s mega-hit The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. That is not because I am dense—or not completely—nor is it exclusively down to the fact that I’d skipped the “By the same author” section.

It is because of the sheer chasm between the two novels; in genre, scale, subject and style. For that Haddon should be applauded. The man’s got range. The author himself has compared “just writing contemporary realism about people like me” to “having the Millennium Falcon and driving it to Sainsbury’s and back”. The implication being that it would be a waste for him to explore only a fragment of the possibilities on offer to the novelist. With The Porpoise, Haddon has displayed a remarkable level of ambition and largely succeeded. It may not all fit together perfectly, but I’d much rather authors tried to reach for something new than played it safe.

I just wish I’d got it all when I read it. I would describe myself as being moderately well versed in the works of Shakespeare, but I knew nothing of Pericles before I read The Porpoise, and not a great deal more afterwards. It is only in the research for this post that I have discovered its origins in the ancient Greek tale of Apollonius of Tyre (renamed by Shakespeare), and the basic narrative of the hero being pursued after revealing King Antiochus of Antioch’s incestuous relationship with his daughter.

By knowing the context, an engaging and exciting read is transformed into something much more layered. Not only has Haddon woven the ancient with the modern in ingenious and beautiful fashion, he has righted some of the wrongs of Apollonius’ story, and Wilkins and Shakespeare’s play.

In Pericles, King Antiochus and his daughter are embroiled in an “incestuous” relationship, as though they are both equally culpable. In The Porpoise, Philippe is exposed for the monster he is. He repeatedly rapes Angelica and tries to justify his heinous crimes to himself: “Who else could protect her in the way he can protect her? He will refrain from full intercourse until she is fourteen. He thinks of this as a kindness.”

Also in Pericles, Antiochus’ victim, his unnamed daughter, is used merely as a plot device, a jumping-off point from which Pericles can have adventures. In Haddon’s novel, the character of Angelica is joined, perhaps literally across the millennia, by Chloe and Marina, wife and daughter of Pericles, in having a voice and agency of their own. As such, The Porpoise is in a similar tradition to the works of Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles and Circe, both excellent) and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, recent novels that have foregrounded the plight of women in Greek myths.

The allusions in The Porpoise are punching you in the face pretty much from the get-go; for one thing the Hampshire home in which Philippe and Angelica live is called Antioch. And the dust jacket makes it very clear you’re in for a reimagining of Pericles (amusingly described by Haddon as one of Shakespeare’s “slightly rubbish plays”). I just didn’t think knowing the story would be a necessity, in fact I thought it might lead to unhelpful comparisons. In this case, that was wrong, and I think I might need to read it again.