Review: 'The Porpoise,' by Mark Haddon

Reading the opening of Mark Haddon's novel "The Porpoise" is like stepping into the ring with Mike Tyson — you're knocked out before you know what's going on. A small plane crashes on a French farm; the pilot is decapitated, his son crushed, as is their passenger, a famous and very pregnant Swedish actress, whose baby girl is saved.

The subsequent story swirls around this girl, Angelica, who's raised by the servants of her very wealthy and lonely father, Philippe, who "loves" his daughter so much he rapes her. Every night after she turns 14. Before we despise him for that, he shows how experiencing trauma re-injects mystery into life — anything can become a potential sign, an omen. Birds carry messages, children act as envoys of the dead, nature reveals itself as supernatural, with "information beyond the end of the spectrum passing from creature to creature, the way decisions flash through a flock of starlings."

The fantastic creeps in, little by little until the novel magically transforms into full fantasy — specifically, a retelling of Shakespeare's retelling of Apollonius of Tyre, from John Gower's "Confessio Amantis," a 33,000-word medieval poem that itself retells the ancient myths of the Greeks and Latins and the Bible, themselves retelling of stories that have been told for millennia. (That is, Haddon is tapping into some deep stuff.) Later we learn a traumatized yet well read teenage Angelica is telling this story to herself, after a wealthy young man's attempt to rescue her goes terribly wrong.

Haddon is renowned for his novel "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," which is excellent, but "The Porpoise" is about a thousand times better. The early sections seem perfectly detailed, but later those details reveal themselves to actually be foreshadows, and the book reformulates itself to be even more perfect. There are dozens of one-liners worthy of being chiseled in stone; for instance: "Perhaps this is what prayer is, when the ceremony and theology are peeled away, a serious stillness in which one talks quietly to one's own best self."

And there are passages so stylistically transfixing that they urge you to kneel down humbled, as Job before God, before the power of nature and of the written word: "It begins mid-Channel, two big winds meeting to force a monumental updraft. Five hundred thousand tons of water vapour hoisted aloft, condensing as they rise to build a cumulus three miles high, the mountain of it sliding over the surface of the sea."

"The Porpoise" pounds away like that, so consistently a pummel of literary excellence I found myself repeatedly checking the cover, making sure the book was written by a human and not an AI designed to compose the best novel this side of the 20th century, as if fed ancient myths, medieval legends, Shakespeare and all the great modern adventure novels, and briefed on the contemporary cultural conversation regarding fourth-wave feminism, and then programmed to weave it all together with the art of a master storyteller.

Randy Rosenthal teaches writing at Harvard University.

The Porpoise
By: Mark Haddon.
Publisher: Doubleday, 305 pages, $27.95.