What Book to Read?

The Canadian writer Yann Martel won the Man Booker Prize for literature for his book Life of Pi in 2002. His next book, Beatrice and Virgil: A Novel, was published in 2010. Beatrice is a stuffed donkey and a Virgil is a stuffed howler monkey; a writer, Henry, overcomes his writing block through an apparently random meeting with a taxidermist. This makes the book sound quaint and amusing, but reviews suggest it is anything but, as Martel uses these stuffed animals as a way of representing the Holocaust. It sounds a most challenging book, so before reading it, I turned again to the earlier Life of Pi to get onto Martel’s individual – almost idiosyncratic – wave length.

Life of Pi is about an Indian boy who is shipwrecked and finds himself alone in a lifeboat with a tiger. The story tells how they both survive.

Martel says that three elements go into his fiction – influence, inspiration and hard work. In Life of Pi, the influence came from a plot he remembered reading about by a Brazilian author, where a Jew fleeing Germany in 1933 finds himself alone in a lifeboat with a panther. With the recollection of this plot came inspiration for his own story. ‘In jubilant minutes’, he says, ‘whole portions of the novel emerged fully formed’. Then came the hard work of research, since everything that was to be in the story was new to him.

There is of course an important fourth element to Martel’s work: creative imagination, a ‘dark luminous place’, to use his words. The story is fiction, so by definition a product of the writer’s imagination. But is Martel trying to make readers believe this story could have happened, or is it some kind of magical realism where the imagination isn’t bound by the normal laws of nature?

Martel plays with reality in several ways. He claims in an ‘Author’s Note’ that Pi is a real person who he interviewed about his survival. As the interviewer, he intrudes several times into the story, for example to tell the reader it has a happy ending. But Pi’s story is told as if from his own first person experience. The intrusive author also reports that Pi himself has given two different versions of his story to bemused officials investigating the sinking of the ship that leaves Pi adrift: the one that is Pi’s account as told in the body of the book, and another one in which the animals in the story are turned into people. So the book is cast as apparent reportage of a story that may or may not have happened, and an alternative story, with the reader left to choose what to believe.

The story of Pi’s amazing survival is just that – a story. The question is whether the author succeeds in making readers suspend their disbelief at this unlikely set of events. Martel rejects ‘dry, yeastless factuality’. ‘If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for?’ Pi asks. For all that, Martel works hard at making his story believable, at least to start with. Pi sounds authentically Indian and his life there is realistic – if somewhat eccentric. His knowledge of animal behaviour is well established. So are his eclectic religious views. However his family’s decision to move their zoo from India for Canada, and the shipwreck on the way, are merely sketched in. They are, after all, just the vehicle for getting Pi alone in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific with a large Bengal tiger.

Once there, Martel uses a lot of precise detail about how animals behave, their interaction with humans, about fish, waves and weather and about the mechanics of survival at sea. The situations described are sometimes horrifying, sometimes beautiful, sometimes amusing, and sometimes simply interesting in themselves. But as time passes and food and water become scarce, the reader might wonder if the apparent recounting of events has verged into hallucination – as it might well do. How much of what Pi recounts is what he remembers, and how much is what he imagines?

Martel denies that the story is fantastic or tricky. ‘I write simple books and I view my readers as my equals’, he says. All the same, he is very clear that fiction should have a higher purpose. ‘In a novel you must amuse as you elevate’, he claims. Without art, he says in the Author’s Note, ‘we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams’.At the end of the story, Pi says to the official interviewing him about the shipwreck ‘I know what you want. You want a story that won’t surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won’t make you see higher or further or differently’. Martel wants the reader to see ‘higher or further or differently’, and I think he succeeds in this in Life of Pi. I’ll definitely read the next one.