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Read
an extract from Life of Pi
The winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize is an
extraordinary book. A boy, with a name that sounds like an obscenity, is the sole
(soul) survivor of a shipwreck - along with a hyena, a zebra, an orang-utan,
and a Royal Bengal Tiger called Richard Parker.
However, it takes about a hundred pages before
Piscine Molitor Patel (he was named after a swimming pool), is cast adrift in
the swells of the Pacific Ocean, after Mrs Gandhi has invaded his family's
comfort zone and forced them to flee to Canada. Before that happens, we
learn a bit more about Pi's extraordinary childhood. Pi is brought up in
Pondicherry, after this tiny part of French India has been ceded to Indian
hands. Pi's father runs a zoo in the grounds of the Pondicherry Botanical
Gardens. It is from here that the animals in the lifeboat come
from. It would seem that Pi has an idyllic childhood, surrounded by a
fantastic model of the natural world, where there are always lessons to be
learnt (some unwilling - Pi's father, suddenly paranoid that Pi or his brother
may want to pet a tiger, shows them exactly how a tiger that's been starved for
3 days reacts to the sudden presence of a bleating goat in its pen - a lesson
that the boys never forget). Pi is also lucky that he goes to some good
schools, and that he has some excellent teachers. A friend of his father's,
Francis Adirubasamy (or 'Mamaji' as he's affectionately known), teaches Pi how
to swim. Unfortunately, Mamaji is also influential in the decision of the
Patel family to name their youngest son 'Piscine': never is a name more apt for
school children to take the piss out of.
Fortunately, Pi asserts the more positive
associations of his name, and more or less baptizes himself with the Greek
letter. He's also lucky that he has a mother who reads widely, and Pi is
allowed to dip into her library, with only the ruder bits of literature being
censored. In short, Pi would appear to be on a perpetual quest, always
discovering new things. In comparison with his brother Ravi, who is the
captain of the local cricket team, Pi is a bit of a loner, but a series of
serendipities ensure his survival. The Patel family is secular, but Pi
finds glory in religious practice(s). An encounter on the esplanade with
three wise men leads to the discovery that Pi is a devout Hindu, Christian, and
Muslim. As his brother Ravi observes, if Pi converted to the Jewish
faith, then he would need only find three other religions to have a day of rest
for every day of the week in perpetuity. Along the way, he finds two Mr
Kumars, one a devout Muslim, and the other a devout atheist science
teacher. Pi only reserves his scorn for Agnostics, the eternal
doubters. It would appear important that Pi has such an abundance of
faith. What else could get you through living with a ferocious tiger
called Richard Parker on a small lifeboat?
Mamaji says that Pi's story could make you believe
in God. There's no doubting the power of Yann Martel's novel, but I
cannot say that it gets me to believe in God. I leave that sort of divine
inspiration to Alice
Walker's The Color Purple (Shug Avery's observation is that when you
"see the color purple in a field" you can't help but feel that there
is a God, and this sounds almost Islamic - although I'm sure the bit about God
being present in an orgasm isn't strictly the word of the Prophet). Life
of Pi does make me want to go to church though, and if it wasn't for those 70
mile an hour winds today, I would have been there like a shot. But then
'Bend it like Beckham' made me want to support local football for a
while. And then there's all that bother of trying to find a good church,
where the priests don't try to make you feel guilty, especially if you've only
popped in for a quick baptism. No, the importance of Life of Pi for me
was the insistence on choosing a "better story". I'm sure this,
more than anything else, must have helped sway the Man Booker judges to plump
for this book. Even the Man Booker webpage accidentally plumped for this
book when it erroneously announced Yann Martel as the winner the week
before. What is the better story? That Man actually went to the
moon and played golf on it, or that it was all faked up in an American TV
studio? The valiant failed attempt by a bunch of suicidal prats to reach
the pole, or the exquisite enduring leadership of a man who brought his men all
the way back, losing only one leg across the oceans? It's the way a story
is told, true or not, that earns its immortality. True, there are some
improbable moments in Life of Pi, where our faith is tested, but Yann Martel is
an excellent fisher of readers: we are on his hook, we may try to fight back
with all our might, but in the end, all of us will have to admit that it is he
who is in control throughout.
From my point of view, we learn more about
psychology rather than religious faith or God in this book. We see very
little of Pi being sustained by religious faith - we are told about it, but we
do not see it actually feeding him, except maybe in that bizarre anti-Eden of
algae. No, this book seems more like an impassioned plea for the values
of fiction itself. As the author of Life of Pi himself writes,
"If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our
imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing
and having worthless dreams". This sounds like a call to arms, and
it's a call that I take up willingly (even if the narrator, like Holly in Rider Haggard's Gothic
Romance She, would appear to be a fictional device, he does have an
authentic tone). When the only zoos we have left are the ones on TV
filled with human inmates, and the only birdsong we hear is that dubbed on
when the inmates are cussing, and when we realise that the live broadcast is a
dull piece of excrement that is somehow sculptured into a bit of sensation by
VT and tabloid editors, and when the only thrill we have is watching animals
decorating each other's cages with presenters that grin like a sloth, and when
modern popular film is filled with loud bangs and pops at the expense of genuine
emotion (anything to elicit a response from a sloth), when music is banal and
explicitly manufactured for the dullest ear, when everything, even the
omnipresent police drama, tastes bitterly of soap (not that a sloth would
notice), when the only thing left to be nicked from Orwell is a rat in your
face, and the only thing left unexpressed in the modern confession box of the
autobiography is the deviant life of the librarian, then the only respite, the
only soul-searching exploration that seems left is in the vast expanses of the
modern literary novel. Long may it have Yann Martel as one of its
champions. If nothing else, this novel proves that Yann Martel's chosen
form has come a long way from the inspiring ineptitude of that other shipwreck
survivor, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
Authortrek Rating:
10/10
Visit our Yann Martel page – which has a “Life of Pi” reading guide |
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