3 good books do not necessarily make one great book.
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The blurb
‘I really am so very, very sorry about this,’ he says, in an oddly formal voice… They strike the side of a grain silo. They are travelling at seventy miles per hour.
A newborn baby is the sole survivor of a terrifying plane crash.
She is raised in wealthy isolation by an overprotective father. She knows nothing of the rumours about a beautiful young woman, hidden from the world.
When a suitor visits, he understands far more than he should. Forced to run for his life, he escapes aboard The Porpoise, an assassin on his tail…
So begins a wild adventure of a novel, damp with salt spray, blood and tears. A novel that leaps from the modern era to ancient times; a novel that soars, and sails, and burns long and bright; a novel that almost drowns in grief yet swims ashore; in which pirates rampage, a princess wins a wrestler’s hand, and ghost women with lampreys’ teeth drag a man to hell – and in which the members of a shattered family, adrift in a violent world, journey towards a place called home.
The Review
I am a huge fan of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. It's an amazingly powerful book (and, on a side-note - the adaptation for theater is also top drawer!) I've not read any of Haddon's other books and I went into this knowing absolutely nothing about it. So first up - it's absolutely nothing like 'The Curious incident'. But that's OK, I massively admire authors that write across multiple genres. The Porpoise starts with a bang and I was utterly hooked. The way the plane crash is described is visceral and with such a dramatic intro, I was excited to dig in.
The ensuing relationship between the bereaved husband and father, Philippe and his daughter, Angelica, pushes every boundary. Incest is a pretty hard topic to read about, but Haddon does a great job of making it suitably unpleasant whilst not overplaying his hand. But, yup, it's pretty grim.
So you're willing for Angelica to escape; to assert herself somehow against her father. And she comes so close to being saved...
And this is where the gritty present tense narrative moves into the mythical parable. We never really understand why this has happened, somehow the characters just change into an ancient Greek fable, which leaves you with a real jarring feeling. At times it felt hugely disjointed, like I was reading 3 different books at once, but not 3 books that complemented each other.
Haddon's interpretation of this Greek tragedy is actually very powerful and I did enjoy it. I just felt that the different story strands weren't woven together at all well. I was frustrated to be removed from Angelica's story to begin with, to go on this mythological adventure. And similarly when suddenly this action broke off to revisit Angelica, the change of pace left me with metaphorical whiplash. (There is also a 3rd strand about Shakespeare and Gower which left me absolutely non-plussed and I have no idea what it added to the story)
Add to all that an ending that didn't really explain what had happened, and why the modern day characters had magically turned into mythical characters from the past and I finished the book feeling frustrated. I actually liked the 2 main story strands but they added nothing to each other and would quite happily have read them as two separate books. I get that there was probably a metaphor here about what is unfolding in Angelica's head...but that needed to be more overtly stated to make any sense.
The Porpoise was released on 9th May 2019 by Random House UK, Vintage Publishing.
Big thanks to Netgalley and the Publishers for the free advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.