Fiction
The Porpoise
Mark Haddon
Chatto & Windus, $29.99
Space restrictions are a good excuse for this review not to open the way reviews of Mark Haddon’s books tend to, by going on about what a hard act to follow The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time must be. So, his new novel, The Porpoise, mines more deeply the vein he first discovered in his excellent short story collection, The Pier Falls, which featured some yarns borrowed from the myth-kitty: Ariadne exiled to Naxos was one, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was another, transformed into a dark satire about the downfall of a smug North London media type.
The Porpoise by Mark Haddon.Credit:
Here the source is Shakespeare’s Pericles, a late and not often produced play – part donkey, part palamino, and derived from various earlier sources.
In Pericles the eponymous Prince starts off wooing the daughter of King Antiochus, but flees the court after he discovers an especially revolting family secret, and then travels around the Mediterranean, encountering the plague, marrying and losing and then being reunited with his wife and daughter. Haddon’s riff on this is set partly in the present day and partly, like the play, in a non-specified period that seems both ancient and early modern. There is another strand, meta and somewhat expendable, set in Elizabethan England with Shakespeare and his Pericles collaborator, George Wilkins, themselves, which looks like an idea Haddon didn’t know quite how to develop but couldn’t bring himself to edit out either.
We live in a Game of Thrones world, and although Haddon is offering us a post-modern jeu of a kind that has been around at least since Angela Carter, his tale of vengeful queens and disguised princes and unstoppable assassins also surfs the crest of the zeitgeist. But then the kinds of writing from which Haddon’s material derives are also among the forebears of contemporary fantasy fiction.
Haddon doesn’t rely too much on Shakespeare’s version. He knows better than to remake the much-admired scene in which Pericles is reunited with his daughter, and the bawdy house scenes that so dismayed the prim critics of yesteryear (and are offputting now for different, better, #MeToo reasons) are recast in 1600s London, providing a glimpse of Elizabethan rape culture: the grim side of his imagination shows no sign of abating.
The strangeness of the story and the bold narrative manoeuvres pull you forward, and the sureness of Haddon’s storytelling, the well-turned set-pieces and the smoothness and detail of the prose keep it all together.
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