Rating: 4/5
Review:
Brilliant but oddly structured
I thought The Porpoise was very good in many ways, but I did have
some reservations.
It is, at heart, a
re-telling of the story of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. However, it
begins in the present day when a very rich man’s newborn daughter,
Angelica, is the sole survivor of a plane crash which kills his wife.
We get the story of Angelica’s growing up in the shadow of her
father’s obsession with her...which then morphs into the tale of
Pericles in ancient times with occasional brief cuts back to
Angelica’s story. It’s not clear whether this is all in
Angelica’s head, but it’s an odd device, made even odder by a
chilling but strange and rather out of place episode of the ghosts of
Shakespeare and his co-author Gower in 17th-Century London.
The individual
stories are compellingly told and I was very gripped by much of the
book. Mark Haddon is exceptionally good at portraying the internal
experience of his characters, so for example we get what it might
really mean to be taken for dead at sea and thrown overboard in a
sealed coffin in terrifyingly chilling detail. All of this is truly
excellent and makes a thoroughly gripping read, but the oddness of
the structure and the weirdness of the transition from the present to
the time of Pericles sat uncomfortably with me. It made me wonder
whether Mark Haddon was trying to put two books together which didn’t
really go.
Overall I enjoyed
The Porpoise and found some parts quite brilliant, but my
recommendation is slightly qualified.
(My thanks to Random
House for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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