Thursday 10 June 2010

Book (Fiction) - A Life of Pi. Yann Martel

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Rating: 4 stars out of 5.

This is Yann Martel's second novel, which concerns a young Indian boy's ordeal of 227 days aboard a lifeboat, with just a 450-pound Bengal tiger for company.

In its deepest essence, Life of Pi seeks to tell a story. Whether tall tale or epic survivalist journey is up to you to decide. At its conclusion, Martel will actually challenge you to do so. But because story is at its focus and telling it is the point, the metaphysical stuff, the allegorical matter, the Zoo parable, the magic realism slinks moodily alongside, like that striped carnivore behind the mind's own high fence. It probably defies outright categorisation for this reason, albeit it not sufficiently enough to prevent it from winning the Man Booker prize in 2002.

The tale follows the struggle of bookish, dreamy Piscine Patel, who truncates his own name to Pi. There are good reasons for this, and they come from early school taunts like  'Pissing' Patel,. In deflecting this routine mockery by aligning himself with that mathematical constant, Martel illustrates his protagonist's cunning.

And so, in  that Greek letter that looks like a shack with a corrugated tin roof, in that elusive, irrational number with which scientists try to understand the universe, I found refuge.
Similarly, in his embracing of  Islam, Christianity and Hinduism, with visits to all three purveyors of those sideshows, Martel demonstrates Pi's objectivism. Not that he is some sage, spiritual everyman; merely that he finds different attractions in all three. This marks out some of the adolescent naivete that will plot his course on a bobbing vessel in the vast Pacific ocean. He doesn't quite grasp the human need to adopt a position, be it football team, politics or religion, and cling to it no matter what, and it is potentially this investment in the possible that will ultimately save him. When a chance meeting of those three belief systems meet, in the market place, with his parents present, the sparks that fly are surprising to him.

"What it comes down to," the priest put out with cool rage, "is whether Piscine wants real religion or - myths from a cartoon strip."

"Gods - or idols," intoned the imam gravely.

"Our gods - or colonial gods," hissed the pandit.

It was hard to tell whose face was more inflamed. It looked as if they might come to blows.

So you understand the build-up to characterise Pi Patel as a recessive tool of whimsy is necessary for the suspension of disbelief that follows. And it's a big suspension, a huge disbelief.

Nonetheless, the facts are catered for, to soften us. Pi's father ran a zoo in Pondicherry, so Pi has experience with animals, or perhaps more importantly, the psychology of animals. Or perhaps crucially, the psychology of animals in captivity. If this lets you believe this boy can share a narrow space (twenty-six feet, from bow to stern to be exact) with a tiger called Richard Parker, then the job is done. The belief that people can resort to any manner of survival processes, including eating human flesh and animal dung...

Richard Parker's anus distended and out of it, like a bubble-gum balloon, came a black sphere of excrement. It fell into my cup with a clink, and no doubt I will be considered to have abandoned the last vestiges of humanness..when I say that it sounded to my ears like the music of a five-rupee coin dropped into a beggar's cup.

...is less problematic. There are more than enough examples of these, true and false, to fuel an entire street of urban myths.

Pi will find out where god really is in the course of his journey and perhaps you will too. His tale is both endearingly simple and staggeringly complex, but the pleasure is in reaching a summit we already know is conquerable, that Martel at the outset tells us, in fact, has a 'happy ending'.

Yann Martel's new novel is called Beatrice and Virgil and is available from bookstores now. Alternatively, you can click the Amazon link below.

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Tony Foster
Manchester, England, United Kingdom
Writer, Father, student, career procrastinator.
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