RaveThe Millions...with his new novel, The Porpoise, Haddon goes deeper still. This time he gives us the gods and goddesses of the ancient world, priestesses and pirates, carnelian and amber. It’s a different kind of storytelling, rich as brocade and powerful indeed ... the experience of reading Angelica’s story is swiftly engrossing, heady, disorienting—a tumble down a churning whitewater. ...That’s the thing about legends, ask any scholar of the classics: They get told and retold and will always reflect the attitudes of the place and time of the teller. Haddon makes these characters resonate simply by giving them a \'realness\' that readers of contemporary fiction crave. They may have old-fashioned names, but they’re bristling with life ... Sex and attraction feature prominently throughout the story, as do birth and death, terror and violence—all the elemental stuff of life that hasn’t changed one bit over the eons—and the drama feels ageless because it is ... Haddon...is stunningly sensitive to not only the plight but also the interiority of all his female characters ... Ultimately, the purpose of this beautiful novel is to remind us—to prove to us—that emotional truths are ageless and universal, the bedrock on which our supposedly real lives are built.
