This stunning novel based on the legend of Pericles navigates myth, imagination and the power of storytelling The two novels Mark Haddon published in the decade following _The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time_, _A Spot of Bother_ and _The Red House_, were both contemporary domestic dramas. Brisk, incisive, and unsparingly honest about family dynamics, they were eminently readable; but as Haddon put it in a recent interview, when you consider the wide-open possibilities of the novel as a form, they were “a bit like having the Millennium Falcon but only using it for going to Sainsbury’s”. His 2016 short-story collection _The Pier Falls_ was a revelation: it blasted into space and followed Victorian explorers into the jungle; injected Greek myth with savage realism in “The Island”, and in “Wodwo” brought the medieval mystery of Gawain and the Green Knight into the present day. _The Porpoise_ gloriously expands the restless, visionary spirit of those tales. It is a version of _Pericles_, with a daughter abused by her father, another daughter lost and in danger, missing mothers and a man on the run who begins his story as an adventuring hero and ends it a broken wanderer. It spreads itself across two realities, opening among the contemporary elite as Philippe, whose family has been “part of a global aristocracy” since Hellenistic times, raises his daughter Angelica as his sexual plaything. “She is made from his body … How could there be a boundary of any kind between them?” Angelica’s mother died in the plane crash that triggered her birth; she is utterly isolated by wealth and rootlessness. Though they live in south-east England, “Beyond those dark hills right now it might as well be Nunavut. It might as well be the Skeleton Coast. Roasted hulks and sun-leathered corpses. It might as well be Pentapolis or Ephesus.” Continue reading...
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