Book review: The Porpoise, by Mark Haddon
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Mark Haddon is still, I suppose, best-known for his first novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which won lots of prizes, among them the Whitbread, and became a worldwide bestseller. Such a success is often a burden for a writer, and may also of course prove a liberation, allowing him the freedom to experiment. It seems to have been the second for Haddon. With The Pier Falls, he ingeniously reworked two myths – Ariadne in Naxos and Gawain and the Green Knight – setting them in today’s world. Now, with The Porpoise, he plays a similar game with one of the most perplexing of Shakespeare’s works, Pericles, Prince of Tyre.