The two novels Mark Haddon published in the decade following The Curious

Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, A Spot of Bother and The Red House,

were both contemporary domestic dramas. Brisk, incisive, and unsparingly
honest about family dynamics, they were eminently readable; but as Haddon put
it in a recent interview, when you consider the wide-open possibilities of the
novel as a form, they were “a bit like having the Millennium Falcon but only using
it for going to Sainsbury’s”. His 2016 short-story collection The Pier Falls was a
revelation: it blasted into space and followed Victorian explorers into the jungle;
injected Greek myth with savage realism in “The Island”, and in “Wodwo”
brought the medieval mystery of Gawain and the Green Knight into the present
day.

The Porpoise gloriously expands the restless, visionary spirit of those tales. It is a

version of Pericles, with a daughter abused by her father, another daughter lost
and in danger, missing mothers and a man on the run who begins his story as an
adventuring hero and ends it a broken wanderer. It spreads itself across two
realities, opening among the contemporary elite as Philippe, whose family has
been “part of a global aristocracy” since Hellenistic times, raises his daughter
Angelica as his sexual plaything. “She is made from his body … How could there
be a boundary of any kind between them?” Angelica’s mother died in the plane
crash that triggered her birth; she is utterly isolated by wealth and rootlessness.
Though they live in south-east England, “Beyond those dark hills right now it
might as well be Nunavut. It might as well be the Skeleton Coast. Roasted hulks
and sun-leathered corpses. It might as well be Pentapolis or Ephesus.”

In the play co-written by Shakespeare, Pericles is the challenger to an incestuous

father. Seeking to marry the king’s daughter, he must solve the riddle that
encodes her abuse: a “confession hidden in plain sight”, similarly insulated by
wealth and status. Here Philippe’s adversary is Darius, a globe-trotting young
playboy – and then the novel shimmers and shifts direction, slipping into a
classical past where the historical references of the early sections become vivid
reality. We sail with Pericles, prince of Tyre; through feasts and famines, plagues
and mutinies, the stories – and after-stories – of his lost wife and child unroll.
We also dip into Jacobean London, in a fantastical riff on the death of Pericles’s
co-writer George Wilkins, a brutal pimp whose corpse is gleefully urinated on by
the women he’s abused.

This is not a book, then, that aims for the coherence of a conventional novel. The
appropriately classical motif of weaving runs throughout, and the stitches at the
back of the tapestry are on show. The Porpoise often hints at its own
construction, with characters intuiting a significance to events that is just beyond
their reach. The different worlds sometimes jut into each other as the narrative
dances on the threshold between reality and imagination. Lonely, myth-obsessed
Angelica “is both teller and listener. She forgets, sometimes, where the page ends
and her mind begins.” A Chinese landscape painting, which the artist vanished
into after its completion, takes on a talismanic power.

But the extraordinary force and vividness of Haddon’s prose ensure that The
Porpoise reads not as a metatextual game but as a continually unfolding
demonstration of the transporting power of stories. Blunt, short sentences
brimming with nouns – food, spices, weapons – propel the reader through a
landscape vaguely familiar from legend but here brought into crisp focus. The
narrative combines chilly omniscience – we are often informed of deaths to come
– with an insistence on the limits and vulnerabilities of its human actors, and a
second-by-second attention to fleeting detail. This is language that knows how to
do things: sail a ship, make a gold buckle, negotiate the tides of the Thames. It’s a
stunningly effective combination of the quotidian and the mythic that, as in “The
Island” or “Wodwo”, pins impossibility to the page.

At the beginning of his journey, the heroic Pericles “does not understand yet that
adventure is the easiest of all challenges”. Though it is, undeniably, a rollicking
adventure story, like Haddon’s short stories The Porpoise is also about humanity
stripped down to its starkest elements by forces beyond its comprehension and
control; about damage and survival, and the balancing act between the two.
Appropriately for a novel inspired by rape, if there is an image that links the
various storylines, it is female resistance: a crowd of vengeful revenants in the
George Wilkins section, Diana and her companions protecting Pericles’ daughter
from a would-be assassin. Angelica only has the power of story to help her
endure, but Haddon shows just how powerful that is.

• The Porpoise is published by Chatto & Windus (£18.99). To order a copy go

to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online
orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.