Stunningly well written
Forget about coherency, just relish the delights of mark Haddon’s powerful prose and the sheer exuberance of his writing.
MARK Haddon’s best known work to date is The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Nighttime (2003), which achieved worldwide success as a book and subsequently as a play. Readers familiar with that work are likely to be totally unprepared, however, for the bag of literary tricks that is The Porpoise.
Time shifts and character transformations are at the heart of this fluid, beguiling, fascinating and occasionally incomprehensible novel. If Haddon’s intention was to exploit fully the possibilities that the novel as a form has to offer, as I suspect it was, then he has succeeded admirably. If you are looking for the traditional strengths of the novel, such as a coherent linear narrative with consistent character development, then this one will not be for you.
The Porpoise opens with a plane crash. Film actress Maja is travelling in a light aircraft across Europe. She is 37 weeks pregnant. The pilot, a friend of a friend, is dazzled by her beauty and despite the presence of his nine-year-old son in the back seat of the cabin, a touch too macho to turn back as bad weather closes in. At over 100kph they slice through a grain silo. The pilot and his son die immediately. A child is born to its dead mother.
The child’s father, Philippe, is a member of the rich, “old money” European elite, “part of a global aristocracy, doggedly secular but with Muslim, Christian and Jewish roots, citizens of the world not in aspiration but in simple fact”. In his mansion in the south of England he calls the baby girl Angelica and brings her up in isolation from the outside world.
As she gets older, his interest in her develops in increasingly unhealthy ways. “She is made from his body, from Maja’s body. How could there be a boundary of any kind between them? ... Who else could protect her in the way that he can protect her? He will refrain from full intercourse until she is 14. He thinks of this as a kindness.”
This scenario is based on the Greek legend of Antiochus of Antioch, who sets would-be suitors of his beautiful daughter a riddle, the answer to which is the identification of his incestuous relationship with the girl. (And yes, it does seem an odd thing to do but that is the legend.) Pericles, aka Apollonius, works it out and is forced to go on the run to avoid death at the hands of a vengeful Antiochus.
This tale was, in its turn, the main source of Shakespeare’s late and co-written play Pericles, Prince Of Tyre. Applied to Philippe and Angelica’s situation, the suitor is Darius, son of an art dealer, who visits Philippe in an attempt to sell him a set of etchings by British artist David Hockney. Darius suspects all is not well, returns to invite Angelica to go on a journey with him, and is killed by Philippe.
If this all sounds rather complicated, well it isn’t really yet – but it is about to get a great deal more complicated. From this point onwards (and we are not far into the book) the legend of Pericles and the story of Angelica become increasingly intertwined.
Angelica loses herself in reading exotic tales and Pericles’ adventures become more exhausting and extreme. There are some spectacular fights, shipwrecks, plagues, famines, mutinies, scheming and treachery – all the elements, in fact, of a very good ripping yarn.
For the reader, the problem of The Porpoise is the extent to which you feel obliged, or want, to try and tie up the various sections of the book into a coherent whole. What is one to make, for instance, of a scene in which the dead Shakespeare takes his collaborator on Pericles, George Wilkins, a pimp and purveyor of women, on a journey along the Thames River in London to receive supernatural retribution for his sins? There is an obvious link between it and the play but not to Haddon’s narrative arcs that we have so far been following.
I am leaving the best to last. The Porpoise is stunningly well-written. The language is vibrant, visceral, intense, the imagery strong and powerful. The scenes Haddon writes about bounce and sing on the page. When his characters suffer (frequently!), we suffer, their misfortunes cruelly involving and embracing our imaginations.
And in the face of this, I ceased to care very much about whether all this fitted together in a coherent and logical manner and went along instead for the ride, relishing Haddon’s powerful prose and the sheer exuberance of his writing. I would be surprised if I read anything more dynamic this year and will struggle to come to terms with any literary prize list that does not feature this book as one of the contenders.