BOOK: Yann Martel, "Life of Pi"

Yann Martel: Life of Pi. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2003. 184195392X. xvi + 319 pp.

This novel made quite a splash when it was first published, in 2001 or so. I'm not sure where I first heard of it myself; probably it was on the website of its British publisher, Canongate. At the time this was a small Scottish publishing company and I was mostly interested in their Canongate Classics series, which included a number of works of older Scottish literature. I bought several of them and visited the publisher's website regularly. Later they began to focus more on publishing modern fiction and I gradually lost interest in them. The Life of Pi, which seems to have been a great success for them, was perhaps an early step in this transition. I bought it soon after it came out in paperback, but only got around to reading it now.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect, and was overall pleasantly surprised. The author clearly has a rich and vivid imagination, and there's something new and unexpected on almost every page. I suspect that people who like literary fiction would not turn up their noses at this novel, but it was also able to entertain someone like me, who am more interested in excitement and storytelling.

In the first part of the novel, we learn about the protagonist's childhood in 1970s India. Pi's father, Mr. Patel, runs a zoo in Pondicherry. Pi's full name is in fact Piscine Molitor Patel, after a swimming pool in Paris which an older friend of the family had frequented while a student there in the 1930s (p. 11; that's what I meant by rich imagination — how do people come up with something as bizarre as this? :)); but our protagonist reinvented himself as Pi after being tired of people mispronouncing Piscine as Pissing (pp. 22–3).

There are many interesting remarks about zookeeping, which is often portrayed in a vaguely negative light nowadays, so it was nice to see Pi describing it in a more positive way. He points out that a wild animal normally maintains a territory large enough to contain the resources it needs — food, water, shelter etc. — and that in a zoo it is provided with all these things in a much smaller area, so it is content to think of that as its territory and does not feel unhappy there. Pi compares this to the way that a modern person is content, indeed happy, to live in a house and does not miss having to roam for miles to reach food or water the way our prehistoric hunter-gatherer ancestors might have done (pp. 16–19).

An odd feature of Pi, which I didn't quite know what to do with, is his religious bent. His parents are vaguely Hindu but in practice almost completely secular; but he becomes an ardent believer in, and practitioner of, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, all three at the same time (pp. 47–62)! There is a very funny scene where the priests of all three religions finally realize that he has been visiting all three of them at once (pp. 65–9).

Due to political and economic uncertainties, Pi's parents decide to close the zoo, sell off the animals and move the whole family to Canada. They embark on a Japanese cargo ship with a sullen Taiwanese crew, and with the Patels (and their animals) as the only passengers. Not too far into the Pacific, the ship has an unexplained accident and sinks quickly, with Pi as the only survivor. And this is where the main part of the story begins.

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Technically, Pi is not the only survivor: besides him, his lifeboat hosts a hyena, a badly injured zebra, an orangutan and, worst of all, a tiger with the implausibly human name of Richard Parker (due to an old bureaucratic mixup; pp. 132–3). Over the next few days, the hyena kills the zebra and the orangutan, and is then itself killed by the tiger.

The middle part of the novel is a great story of survival at sea, as Pi has to exert all his mental and physical energies to stay alive and prevent the tiger from attacking him. He puts his zookeeping skills to good use and sort of tames the tiger much the way a circus trainer might do (pp. 43–4, 164–5, 203–7). Using the various supplies stored on the lifeboat, he makes an improvised raft so he can keep some distance from the tiger if necessary; he deploys solar stills and raincatchers to obtain fresh water; he catches fish, turtles and even the occasional shark, knowing that he must keep providing the tiger with food if he wants to have any chance of staying alive.

The story takes on a somewhat picaresque character as various incidents happen in a seemingly random order; storms, sharks, whales, a close encounter with a large tanker (which unfortunately doesn't notice Pi's lifeboat; pp. 233–4), sailing through what seems to be the great Pacific garbage patch (pp. 237–8), etc. But things grow more and more fantastic and bizarre as the story progresses, in a way which perhaps reflects the gradual breakdown of Pi's own mind. (This reminded me a little of Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym.)

Over the course of several months, it becomes clear that despite all his efforts, the overall lack of food and the exposure to the elements are slowly weakening both Pi and the tiger. At some point they both go blind due to weakness (p. 241), and in that condition they even meet another equally blind survivor, who tries to board Pi's boat, apparently with a view to cannibalizing him, but is then killed and eaten by the tiger (pp. 254–5). But did this really happen or was Pi just hallucinating at that point? (A few pages ago he reported a conversation with the tiger, so he was definitely halucinating then; 243–5.)

Eventually they reach a large floating island composed of algae, and the story takes leave of all sanity. The algae apparently filter salt out of the freshwater, so eating them provides Pi (and the tiger) with both food and drink, and they gradually recover their strength. Venturing deeper into the island, Pi finds freshwater pools, enormous colonies of meerkats (p. 266), forests of trees that seem to grow out of the algae (p. 271) and the meerkats sleep in their branches (pp. 275–6; in the real world, of course, meerkats sleep in underground burrows). Finally Pi finds a tree bearing some very peculiar-looking fruit; each of these, as it turns out, after unwrapping countless layers of leaves, contains a human tooth at its core (pp. 270–80). Pi realizes that the whole island is practically a gigantic predatory organism; the algae on the ground emit some sort of acid at night, which is why the meerkats sleep in the treetops; the acid is mostly intended to kill the fish that happen to swim into their freshwater ponds, but it seems that at some point some other human castaway fell victim to the island as well (pp. 281–3).

Horrified by this discovery, Pi boards his lifeboat (along with the tiger) and sets off again, eventually reaching the coast of Mexico with no further incidents. The tiger promptly disappears into the jungle. The story ends with one last surprise as two Japanese officials come talk to Pi in the hospital, hoping to learn more about what had happened to their ship. They find his story of surviving in the boat with a tiger hard to believe, so he comes up with another, even grislier story; this time, instead of animals, there are several other human survivors: Pi, his mother, an injured sailor, and the ship's cook, who happens to be a brutish Frenchman. The cook kills the injured sailor and then Pi's mother, but is eventually himself killed by Pi. The Japanese officials cannot help noticing that this story corresponds closely to the original one, with Pi's mother standing for the orangutan, the cook for the hyena, the sailor for the zebra, and Pi for the tiger. They decide they that they liked the animal version better after all.

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I don't pretend to have any clear idea of what to make of any of these things. Is Pi's second story the true one, while the first one (with the tiger and all the other animals) was just a big hallucination? Or a deliberate lie? Pi, at the end of the book, doesn't seem to care very much about which story is true; they are both simply stories to him. I suppose this is very postmodern and all, and will no doubt meet with much approval from certain circles, but it feels very frustrating for a simple-minded reader like myself.

I was also not sure what to make of the bizarre meerkat-infested island of acid-secreting algae. There is a fine line between ‘rich imagination’ and ‘throwing out one damn random thing after another’, and I couldn't help feeling that the author oversteps it a little from time to time. And of course you can't help noticing the religious aspect of the whole thing; surely the island, with its abundance of food and water provided by the algae, and its lack of any predators, is meant to resemble the earthly paradise of christian mythology, with Pi as a modern-day Adam who eventually has to flee from it after plucking that grisly tooth-bearing fruit from a tree. But why would that whole thing have to be there, at that point in this story? How does it fit into anything else? Why does Mr. Adirubasamy at the start of the novel say that this story would “make you believe in God” (p. xii)?

Clearly, religion is meant to have a certain presence in this novel, but I don't really understand what we're supposed to make of it. The author isn't exactly preaching at us, and I find it hard to imagine that reading this novel would convert anyone to anything. Any why, if he wanted us to become interested in religion, would he always take such care to provide (just barely) rational explanations for everything that happens in the novel?

But I shouldn't complain too much; overall this book was a very pleasant read, I enjoyed the earlier and middle parts of it a great deal, and the things that remain unexplained (to me at least) do not really get too much in the way of a good story of survival at sea, told by a storyteller with a delightful, sparkling imagination.