This is one of the strangest novel I have ever read. It starts normally enough with the story of a rich art dealer, whose very pregnant wife dies in a place crash, but a doctor manages to save his baby daughter. He calls her Angelica and keeps her away from the world, and starts to sexually abuse her. Then the book takes a sudden turn into Greek mythology and the story of Pericles, and his adventures around the Mediteranean.
I found it difficult to follow, and the constant changes in time and place were very confusing, especially when the ghost of Shakespeare and Wilkins who are supposed to have written the play Pericles, Prince of Tyre.
The unexpected ending also is hard to take, and feels almost as an aside to the two main stories. However, I am sure that the authors' fans will enjoy it.

Oh, Mark Haddon, what have you done? I used to love your beautifully woven stories. This one reads like you employed a camera man on acid: Plot #one, roll, roll, roll - oops, one of the characters is about to die - pan to plot #2, roll, roll, roll - oops, one of the characters is about to die - pan to plot #3 and so forth. Combined with lengthy descriptions of modern day and antique combat, it just wasn’t for me. Granted, there were some well-turned aspects within this giant eddy of characters modern and ancient swirling around plots of wealth, incest and power, but their disconnection irritated me.

I really do not know what I make of this book.

There are two enormous tone shifts early on after what I found to be a gripping opening chapter. There is a sudden change into a dark incestuous abusive paedophilic theme, and then later a fantasy historical shift. The first change made me literally say “oh god, no” out loud and consider giving up on the book within the first couple of chapters. The second just took a while to get used to.

I went into the book not knowing that it was based on the Shakespearean play Pericles of Tyre (based on the Middle Ages novella Apollonius of Tyre), and not knowing anything about that myth in particular (had I known this story previously, the aforementioned tonal shifts would probably not have thrown me so much). Having since read the basis of the story, I'm not sure that I would have wanted to read the book with that knowledge, as it doesn't seem to offer a great deal of new insight.

The book does, however, manage to be unique while paradoxically being completely derivative. It is certainly unlike anything else I've read before.

Despite having the excuse of being based on a story from the Middle Ages, it’s jarring to read a modern book with so much repetitive female misery which largely serves the purpose of being a catalyst for the male protagonist.

From the Author’s Note at the end - <i>“[in all retellings] the daughter of the King of Antioch is rarely more than a device to set Pericles / Appolinus / Apollolonius on the journey where he will have his real adventures”.</i>

Women’s misery being a plot device to spur male adventure is one of the most boring, overused tropes, and one that should have been left behind in the Middle Ages.

That said, it was an engaging read, despite the slightly disjointed writing style. The sentences are short. The tense is present. And yet the latter, usually a pet peeve of mine for third person POVs, somehow works in the uncertain, fantastical world that has been created.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC in exchange for an honest review. Review posted to Goodreads.

Thanks to Random House UK and NetGalley for the Advance Review Copy in exchange for an honest review.

I didn't really 'get' this book and don't think I was really able to appreciate it. I just don't think my head was able to get into the zone it needed to get into when reading it.

The book mashes up a story set in the modern day with Shakespeare's Pericles and other themes related to Greek Mythology. On paper this is right up my alley, but I just wasn't able to engage with it unfortunately.

There are twists and turns and abrupt changes in the narrative and plot which left me more than a little bamboozled. It's the kind of book that's quite hard to describe. I did finish it but, I don't think I was able to really get much out of it personally. Clearly a very ambitious book and certain aspects of the story were engrossing, I'm just not sure how well it all knitted together. One to revisit at a later date maybe.

A baby survives a plane crash that kills her mother, raised alone with her father. A young man arrives and realizes things are not what they seem but he is forced to flee sending him off on an adventure of his own.

This was quite a strange story and really took some following. I'm not totally sure I fully understood all what was happening. It jumps around an awful lot which left me very confused at times. The basic story with Angelica is quite dark and features some child abuse so a warning to those who may be triggered by that. I enjoyed Marina's story most of all but the rest was a little too rushed for me. Many others will enjoy it though especially the historical aspects.

I really loved the opening to this novel and was totally gripped by the story of Philippe and Angelica, but then the narrative was abruptly whisked away for the far less successful (for me) historical tales of Pericles and the women surrounding his story. Because I have enjoyed the beautiful writing and different styles of other works by Mark Haddon, I was willing to be grabbed and intrigued by the changes in location, personnel and time, but found the stories clashed and, perhaps deliberately, didn't mesh in the novel as a whole. This was such a shame, as I felt this was an unusual and ambitious assignment - putting a rather complex and confusing Shakespearean play into a modern and relevant setting - but it did not work for me. Maybe the totally implausible plot of the original was impossible to bring to life in a credible modern way in the technological age of the internet and easily accessible information and influences? There were some excellent, well written and absorbing episodes here, and it was not too onerous to read to the end, but I felt the book was not an entirely enjoyable or satisfying experience, as I had hoped.

I'm sorry, but I just didn't like this book at all. I didn't get it. I understood what the author was trying to achieve, but for me it just didn't work at all.

My thanks to Netgalley and Random House for the copy

I was sent a copy of The Porpoise by Mark Haddon to read and review by NetGalley.
I was really looking forward to reading this book but have come out with very mixed feelings. At times the story can be very confusing, and I think the author has tried to tie in too many ideas at once to make a completely coherent plot. Some of the prose is really well written – and some is not. At times I found myself getting really into the story – and sometimes not. I found that the author’s voice was mainly quite dispassionate and rather too matter of fact making the novel lean towards an essay style, which didn’t quite work for me. I enjoyed the premise of the story and I liked the way things slipped through time in the first instance, but on the whole I think that the book could have been so much better with a lot more editing and with the author putting more of his heart and soul into the narrative. I would have given a rating of 3½ had it been possible, and I don’t rate it as low as a 3 so I have settled for a 4 star rating – an slightly unsatisfactory outcome which ties in quite nicely with how I feel about this book!

Mark Haddon's latest book The Porpoise is an unusual one. It starts off with a beautiful pregnant woman dying in a plane crash, and her daughter, Angelica, surviving and being raised by her father Phillip. As Angelica grows older she is taken out from school and kept away from prying eyes, with Phillip treating her like a replacement for his lost wife. When Darius, an art seller, comes to the house, he is taken by Angelica's beauty and is able to sense things aren't as they should be. Phillip in trying to conceal his secret sends out his loyal bodyguard to deal with Darius, who boards The Porpoise to sail to Spain and save his life. Here the story begins to blur, into one of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a tale told by William Shakespeare. The rest of the book goes back and forth between the present and the ancient tale,

I found the change between the two different stories a surprise and somewhat confusing at first as I was just getting into the escape of Darius, but as the story of Pericles unfolds I thought it was beautiful, thrilling and at times heartbreaking. I found it a little unsatisfying the way the story of Pericles concludes as I wanted to know more, and at times the back and forth made for a disjointed reading. As for the story as a whole I thought it was imaginative, daring and I found myself thinking of it days after I finished. It's not your conventional storytelling but it is one that is certainly worth reading.

Be warned – if you pick this one looking for more of the same regarding The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, then you’ll be disappointed. This is nothing like it, particularly the immersive first-person viewpoint that made Christopher sing off the page. This book is told throughout in omniscient viewpoint – the storyteller’s point of view. While we do spend short periods in the head of various characters, they are not what powers this story – and we are regularly given information that they are not privy to. I’ll be honest, if the story hadn’t been very well told and one that I hadn’t known, then I don’t think I’d have got through it. This is my least favourite viewpoint and it is a tribute to Haddon’s skill that once I relaxed into the rhythm of the writing and the cadences of the story, not dissimilar to those ancient Greek legends upon which aspects of this is based, I enjoyed it.

This story is a dual narrative, covering two timelines separated by thousands of years. We start with a plane crash that leaves a motherless newborn baby to be brought up by her very wealthy, doting father. And here comes my next warning – this book covers incest and child abuse, and though there are no graphic scenes, Angelica’s plight would certainly be a trigger for anyone affected. As her initial chance for escape disappears and her would-be rescuer flees for his life, the story abruptly jumps back in time.

Is this Angelica’s imaginings taking her to a different place? Or a mirroring of the same plight through the prism of time? We are never told and it’s left for the reader to make up her mind. But the blurb nails it in the second paragraph – the rest of the book plunges us into an adventure full of lost love, storms, pirates and perilous escape, in sharp contrast to the slow passing of time for Angelica as she tries to escape her father’s attentions.

That ending is both shattering and unexpected and has had me musing on this one long after I finished reading it. I’ve come away from this book with mixed feelings – I found it a gripping, unexpected adventure, but also quite disturbing. It has certainly wormed itself inside my head – recommended for readers who enjoy unusual, challenging stories where the ending doesn’t necessarily leave everything neatly tied up.

The ebook arc copy of The Porpoise was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest opinion of the book.
8/10

A plane crashes and a baby born. A dramatic start to a very gripping book. The baby girl grows up in an isolated relationship with her father that is unhealthy and oppressive. A failed rescue leads to a man on the run.
And now time changes and we follow lives of others with all the twists and turns of Greel tragedies.
Cannot say I always understood it but could not put it down and sad when it ended. Just read and lose yourself in the words of this very exciting book.

This is a slow build of sometimes uncomfortable situations, death, adventure and overlapping time zones. A tapestry of threads binds the characters in parallel worlds, where forbidden love and tragedy across land and sea grips the reader. Enchantment and myth jostle with cruelty and abandonment, storms tear worlds apart, but beauty and resilience live on. Vignettes of tender moments stay in my mind’s eye: a stag which stands and watches outside Diana’s temple; the scene on the river where lost souls appear. It is a fantastic read.

‘There was a king’s daughter who married a prince and they loved one another beyond measure. It happened a long time ago and far away and there is nothing to connect that woman to the woman sitting here on the terrace under the vines.
She says, “My name is Emila.”’

If you come to this having read Haddon’s ‘Curious Incident…’ then prepare for something quite, quite different. It takes a brave man to write a novel that takes in incest, Shakespeare’s ghost, Greek myth and female empowerment, and what Haddon has produced here is, for me, a triumph of story telling and emotional integrity. The book opens with a pregnant woman flying home to her husband; the small plane crashes and all aboard are killed but the baby is delivered safely. Anjelica is raised by her uber-rich father Philippe on his estate called Antioch near the town of Winchester (here we get the first faint echo of an overriding mythology that will soon overtake us). As the child grows Philippe starts to abuse here – and yes, I’m afraid the subject matter is suitably grim. In a conspiracy of silence, the entire household carry on as if nothing was happening, until one day a young man called Darius calls on the house to sell to Philippe some Hockney prints of the Grimm fairy tales. He suspects something is amiss and tries to rescue Anjelica, but fails and, wounded, escapes, to be pursued by one of Philippe’s faithful retainers….

I give some detail about how the story starts because, under Haddon’s subtle mastery, it hints at what is to come. Somehow Darius’s flight becomes the story of Pericles (and yes, I would suggest you bone up on your Gower and/or Shakespeare before you read this because it will make so much more sense!) – but in doing so, we are never sure how or why. Is this a dream of Anjelica’s, fond as she is of reading tales of Greek myth? Why do we also get the vignettes of George Wilkins, co-author with Shakespeare of the play ‘Pericles’? In these, the ghost of Shakespeare comes to Wilkins when he dies and escorts him on a boat journey down the Thames. And as the story of Darius truly becomes the story of Pericles, we keep flashing back to the house in Winchester and Anjelica’s story, as she first refuses to speak, and then refuses to eat, becoming more and more ill.

You really just need to immerse yourself in this, and whilst the Pericles story is involving, it is the female characters that Haddon writes that are so striking. Chloe (Thaisa in the original play), Pericles’ wife and Marina, their daughter, have a mystical quality to them that makes them somehow symbols of survival and human kindness. There are so many subtle touches to the story: as a child, Anjelica’s first spoken word is ‘water’, hinting at the story of Marina, the daughter born at sea, that is to come. One of the recurring motifs is that of stories and myth-making, not only as Anjelica reads passages from her books that somehow become passages in the book that we are also reading, but each of the main characters see themselves as part of a story. Words, images, events repeat themselves in magical ways. The whole thing is written in the present tense, which gives the entire unfolding story the sense of fairy tale or myth. The ending is sublimely understated, allowing us to only imagine at the future of the three main characters. But the actual ending of the book returns us to Winchester, and Anjelica and her father, whose story somehow created the myth. It is suitably true to the Pericles story and leaves the reader with a sense of closure, yes, of justice, and a sense of passing from reality to myth.

With every passing page I found myself totally engrossed in this wonder of a book. It is a book about journeys, and love, and trying to find your way home. It is the kind of novel that expects something from a reader, a sense of opening your mind to the power of stories and of words, and I can see why some reviewers have been left a little perplexed. For me, it is undoubtedly one of the best books I’ve read this year so far, and fully keeps my faith in the modern novel. What a joy it is to find writers writing such books. Totally deserving of 5 stars.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)

I have read and really enjoyed two previous Mark Haddon books, The Curious Incident and The Red House, so I was looking forward to this. But it wasn’t quite what I expected and I ended up struggling to finish. The opening scene, in the plane, was masterful, and initially I was intrigued. But then one of the characters suddenly woke up in Ancient Greece (the novel is, to start with at least, set in the present day), and things just got quite confusing. In the end, not one for me.

Not Mark Haddon’s usual fare and unfortunately not my cup of tea. It was, without a doubt, too clever for me.

I’m not well versed in Greek mythology and have only read the obligatory (school) Shakespeare so, although I was completely absorbed in the plot surrounding Angelica and Darius I had no idea what was going on for a lot of the book. The movement between timelines didn’t help but I think my disorientation was more down to unfamiliarity with the original works that this was reworking.

Thanks to Netgalley for providing an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

My thanks to Random House U.K. Vintage Publishing/Chatto & Windus for an eARC via NetGalley of Mark Haddon’s ‘The Porpoise’ in exchange for an honest review.

‘The Porpoise’ is essentially a retelling of the story of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Apollonius/Appolonius). Yet rather than being only set in the ancient world it is blended with a modern-day tale that echoes elements of Pericles’ story with interludes that visit George Wilkins, Shakespeare’s collaborator on ‘Pericles’, at the end of his life in the early 17th Century.

I was not familiar with the source material of the Shakespeare/Wilkins play or the earlier myths though this was no barrier to my enjoyment. I appreciated that in his Author’s Note Haddon provided extensive background and his sources.

This novel is beautifully written, adventurous, multi-layered, complex, and breathtaking in its blending of myth, legend, and literature. Over a day after finishing I find myself feeling stunned.

I am totally in awe of Haddon. It takes great confidence and skill to not only write such elegant prose but to set aside conventions, including movement through time, tackle uncomfortable subjects such as incest and jealousy, while creating a work that while clearly literary remains accessible.

I fell in love with ‘The Porpoise’ and have never read anything quite like it. On completion I immediately bought my own hardback as I certainly want to reread to experience it again and again.

I have read and enjoyed a couple of other books by the same author and was looking forward to this one. It is however something of a disappointment overall.

I felt the beginning was going well and had the makings of an interesting novel surrounding loss and grief with more than a smattering of incest thrown in. However, somewhere in the hospital the story evolved into a retelling of Shakespeare's Pericles with no real connection between the two. At first I thought we were in the dream of Darius but this turned out not to be the case. I simply don't understand how we went from the moneyed lifestyle pf Phillipe in France and England to raging through the Greek mythology as told in plays by Shakespeare.

I think the book was saved from a one star review simply by the ability of the author to build scenes that dragged the reader into their midst. However it cannot truly be called a narrative rather disjointed pictures

The Porpoise is by far Mark Haddon's strangest and most unique novel, and that's exactly what I loved about it. From the beginning, you are launched head first into the action which is quite a shock to the system. It is apparently inspired by Pericles, Prince of Tyre, written in part by Shakespeare, so those who enjoy Greek Mythology will likely find much to love here. Exquisitely written, fascinating and a highly original and dramatic story which broaches some dark and disturbing topics, this is a difficult book to put down. Due to divisive topics and it being more than a little odd I feel this is what readers call a Marmite read - one you'll either love or hate.

This is a thoroughly ambitious novel that switches between reality and myth many times until the two merge. An engaging, absorbing and surprising page-turner with its roots set deeply in the 16-century tales of old. It had an ethereal, almost dreamlike atmosphere to it which was rather mesmerising and the twists and turns keep you reading despite the uncomfortable subject matter. I have been a huge fan of Haddon since the publication of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but this is rather far removed from that tale. A highly entertaining and different read. Recommended to those who enjoy unusual fiction. Many thanks to Chatto & Windus for an ARC.

I didn't know what to expect when I started this book. I like literary fiction because if written well, it explores ordinary lives and finds the extraordinary. Characters have to be realistic and complex for this to work.

This is a different type of literary fiction, the characters are not ordinary, but rich, hedonistic and seemingly living outside the moral code ordinary mortals abide by. There is also large sections of the story where the characters are mythical, and you are unsure whether this an alternative reality, a story, or a journey back in time. These characters mirror many of the contemporary players.

The main focus of the story is an abused child, powerless with no voice, and no one to protect her, from her father, and his immorality. Reading what happens to Angelica evokes a myriad of emotions; anger, disgust, and sadness the most prevalent. This story is worthwhile reading because it gives her voice, and shows as she matures she attempts to take her life back into her control. Outsiders so-called heroes profess to help her escape but they don't, she is ultimately the strength in this story.

There is an adventure, suspense and great storytelling in 'The Porpoise', it perhaps helps to have some knowledge of the older stories that are weaved into the contemporary tale, but I didn't, and I was still intrigued and motivated, to see what happens next.

Just dive in, and let the stories absorb you. If you try to understand everything in this book, you will spoil the storytelling experience. Looking for something different to read? This is for you.

I received a copy of this book from Random House UK, Vintage Publishing - Chatto & Windus in return for an honest review.

I'm in two mind about this book: on one side it's well written and some part are enthralling. on the other side I found the plot confusing and the book feel flat.
Many thanks to Random House UK and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.