Three years ago, the British director Trevor Nunn brought Shakespeare’s not-often-performed play “Pericles, Prince of Tyre” to Brooklyn. A retelling of the ancient legend of Apollonius, “Pericles” is (broadly) about the highly masculine adventures of a macho prince, and it is on many levels a problematic piece of work.

“When you first read the play, you think, What?” Nunn said at the time.

You may have the same response, at first, when you pick up Mark Haddon’s new novel, “The Porpoise.” Haddon is still best known for “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” his remarkable novel about a teenager with autism who is trying to find meaning in the chaos of his family life.

Haddon is the author of several other novels and, among other things, a book of fantastical short stories and a collection of poems. With “The Porpoise,” he is attempting his most daring project yet: a retelling of “Pericles” — and thus a retelling of the retelling of the story of Apollonius — set in both the present and the past; in reality (so to speak) and in myth.

But it would be a mistake to think of this novel as simply a contemporary version of Shakespeare like, say, Jane Smiley’s “A Thousand Acres,” which took “King Lear” and brought it to a 20th-century Iowa farm. Haddon is playing a longer, more complicated game. It takes time to see what it is.