| Review: Yann Martel, Life of Pi |
| Everyone who pays attention to books knows about it
by now. A sixteen year old guy nicknamed Pi is trapped at sea in a
lifeboat with a ferocious Bengal tiger, a dilemma that must seem as
unending to Pi as the ocean of time and water on which these unlikely
companions float across the rolling and capricious world of the Atlantic—as
ceaseless indeed as the mathematical symbol that happens to be his
name. The book, of course, is the novel by Canadian writer Yann Martel
entitled Life of Pi, winner of the Man
Booker Prize for fiction. Narrated throughout by Pi, whose full name is Piscine Patel (his parents named him after a pool, Piscine Molitor, in Paris), the initial segment of the novel is full of animal lore picked up from his experiences in the zoo owned by his father in Pondicherry, India before the shipwreck in which Pi’s father, mother and brother perish attempting to migrate to Canada. Though Martel seems to be marking time in this segment, indulging a long hesitation before venturing upon his central story, much of the lore is downright engaging. We learn, for instance, that animals, being territorial creatures, won’t desire to escape from a biologically sound zoo. It becomes their territory. When they do escape, it is not to somewhere else but from some defective condition. About some of the creatures on the other side of the moats and bars, the human visitors, we learn that their behavior can be little short of vicious: deliberately feeding razor blades, broken bottles, ballpoint pens and the like to the animals. Even kindly visitors, probably the majority, frequently cause gastric problems in the animals by offering various tidbits that break the careful diets prepared by zoologists. To be sure, elements of this segment may be germane to the behavior of animals in the main story, but only glancingly. More relevant are passages in the same segment that render the character and personality of Pi himself, especially through his flirtations with religion. In these, he is catholic with a small ‘c,’ having sought out instruction in Christian, Hindu and Islamic beliefs and practices and declared himself to be an adherent of all three religions, a kind of universalist of faith. As for non-believers, he feels simply that they are missing out on “the better story.” In the more earthly aspects of his personality, he is given to thoughts that are wise in the way Thoreau was wise: “a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he’s not careful.” That’s Pi, not Henry David. The meat of the novel—both metaphorically and literally—is the tale of the ordeal in the lifeboat, which is inhabited initially by a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and of course by Pi and the tiger (endowed with the name Richard Parker by a mistake in a clerk’s record-keeping). Vividly rendered in all their grimness are the events through which the less imposing animals are transformed into sustenance for each other and finally for Richard Parker and thus into temporary safety for Pi, a safety which is only too short-lived on this grueling voyage of more than seven months. To sustain himself and keep his boat-mate from transforming him as well into food, Pi is forced to extremes of effort and ingenuity: to constant fishing with the emergency supplies on the lifeboat, to snaring sea turtles when he can, to catching rainwater, and to other subterfuges of survival. The implicit paradox of his situation is that Pi would never have survived the ordeal at sea without the constant and awesome menace of his fierce companion. By the threat of a gory death he has been given his life. It is fitting, then, that he can declare afterward his love for Richard Parker. In the dramatized coda, Pi raises knotty speculations based on the foregoing events, speculations which are not to be given away here except to say that they go full circle to Pi’s thoughts on those various religions of his, to questions regarding “the better story.”
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