The Porpoise is beautiful – polished oak, polished brass, everything singing with little bursts of sunlight. There is a ship's wheel with protruding handles at which you could stand and be Barbarossa or Vasco da Gama, there are cream canvas sails which belly and ripple and slap, there are portholes and winches, there are proper ropes of twisted sisal.
The Porpoise is a book that's very of this moment: It could pass as a volume in the Hogarth Shakespeare Series (as a modern-set retelling of Pericles, it has the ironic self-awareness of Shylock is My Name); it traces the patriarchy/rape culture back to Western Canon foundational texts (as did The Red Word); it attempts to give voices to those female characters from the epics who seemed to exist just to be ravaged or abducted to advance the tales of male characters (like Circe or The Silence of the Girls); and it adds a bit of feminist revenge fantasy (a la The Power). Author Mark Haddon blends all of this together in surprising and effective ways – the sentences are sharp and the characterisations are believable – but the format seems unnecessarily muddied; I might have abandoned this when it first took a hard curve (but am glad I didn't). My other niggling complaint – which I'm still mulling over – is whether this kind of feminist-smash-the-patriarchy story is a man's to tell. Still mulling. As I didn't know the plot of Shakespeare's Pericles, or the original Greek tale of Appollonius of Tyre, the details here were surprising to me – so I'll place the rest of this review behind a spoiler warning. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
***Spoilers Beyond ***
The book opens with a plane crash: A pregnant woman dies at the scene and her husband is initially uninterested in the infant daughter who is saved – until he becomes sexually obsessed with her as a replacement for her mother. This man, Phillipe, is from very old European money, and as he has always been able to buy anything he wants, he is able to keep his daughter, Angelique, hidden away at the family estate; his staff paid well for their loyal silence. Angelique is not allowed friends, public schooling, TV, or internet, so while she has no other models for family life, she does know that her relationship with her father is harmful: when he comes to her at night, she sends her mind far away into the plots of old classics she has read. When Angelique is sixteen, a young art dealer, Darius, brashes his way into the home, and when he intuits what Phillipe's dark secret is – and when Phillipe jealously recognises his daughter's attraction to the young man – Darius is lucky to escape with his life; hiding away on a yacht, the Porpoise, that his friends are set to sail to its new owner in the Mediterranean. Angelique is devastated by the glimpse and denial of a different way of life and she stops speaking, and soon, stops eating. When the scene returns to Darius, the reader watches as he morphs into Pericles – who also happened to command a ship named the Porpoise – and it takes some time to realise that the rest of his story happens in Angelique's declining mind; tracing the story of Pericles, his wife, and daughter, and giving them the happy ending that her own family didn't enjoy.
In both the modern-day and the Classical Greek timelines, Haddon's writing is rich and evocative. In another layer of this mash-up, a couple of sections trace the story of George Wilkins – the pimp and poet that some scholars infer wrote the first half of Shakespeare's Pericles – and this dip into Elizabethan England is also a joy to read. Shakespeare himself leads a freshly dead Wilkins from his bedchamber to meet his fate: being left alone and adrift on the Thames as his small boat is surrounded by the Siren-like specters of the women he had used and abused in his bawdy house:
Is this a punishment? It was bad enough being led here by his offensively prolific one-time collaborator, but to discover that the sex too weak to have dominion in the physical world are possessed of demonic powers in the other is too hard to bear. Dear God, he gave many of these women employment. If it weren't for his business they would have been on the streets at best. The thought is pointless. There is very clearly no one here to whom he can plead his case.Angelique herself makes an appearance as the sea monster who deals out Wilkes' final punishment – and while I find that in theory to be wholly satisfying (literarily and emotionally), this was where I began to find Haddon becoming heavy-handed with the anti-patriarchy rhetoric (which, again, only kind of bugged me because he's a man). In a later scene, Pericles' daughter, Marina (who was raised by foster parents in a faraway kingdom), has been kidnapped by an agent of the evil Queen. The Goddess Diana and her cohort come to Marina's rescue:
He does not want to die. He has never had this thought before. More deer come out of the dark. Fifteen? Twenty? Equally indifferent, equally unafraid. Then, behind the deer, he sees the women. If he had been asked what would frighten him most at night in the hills he might have said a hungry bear, or a band of armed men perhaps. But this scares him more than anything he could imagine. Tunics, javelins. The world turned upside down, the weak given power. The revenge they could justify if they had the means at their disposal. A life would not be long enough to repay the debt.(I don't believe that this mercenary actually had those thoughts, but I suppose it's plausible if I remember that it's Angelique – helplessly under the power of her father and rapist – telling herself the tale the way she wants it to go.) As Marina makes her way through the woods, she notes that a young girl is only safe while under the protection of an older man, and the entire narrative is filled with this sort of “this is what the patriarchy/rape culture looks like” inner commentary. Angelique is at one time thinking about Ariadne and Minerva's weaving competition – in which Ariadne wove a tapestry that depicted all of the forms that Jupiter assumed in order to rape unwitting human women (there's that subtext again) – and throughout the book, there are numerous references to spiders and weaving; I really don't need (or like to be) knocked over the head with allusions. But in a book with some missteps (which I am still mulling over), I think that Haddon wrote something quite special here (since this is behind spoiler tags I guess I can add that I like the uncertainty over whether or not Darius ever did leave the estate alive [hard to tell where Angelique's fantasy starts] and I really liked how the assassins trailing Pericles were called off once Philippe and Angelique “were struck by lightning” [it may have tipped the ending too soon, but the foreshadowing in this book always added interest]). I can't fault Haddon for recognising and wanting to help right the imbalance of power between the sexes – the book is so of this moment – I guess I just question the authenticity of a man writing from the POV of the vulnerable female.
