Book Review: Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

Book: Life of Pi
Author:Yann Martel
Publisher: Canongate
ISBN 1 84195 392 X

I bought the novel soon after it won Man Booker in 2002 but couldn’t get myself to read beyond the first twenty pages.The surreal fable the book blurb promises was no where to begin in the first hundred pages. Caring little for adventure stories i gave up after many futile attempts. But the final attempt i made recently was different. I picked up the novel and said to myself “I am not reading this one for plot”. This made all the difference. The novel opened itself to me.

Yann Martel’s Man Booker winning novel, Life of Pi is an adventure novel narrated by Piscine Molitor Patel, a sixteen year old son of a zoo keeper who survives at the Pacific for more than 200 days following the sinking of the cargo ship Tsimtsum heading Canada carrying his family and the zoo animals. Pi finds himself in an unconvincing situation.

The vast stretching Pacific Ocean, a lifeboat with a Hyena, a Zebra, a female Orang-utan, a Bengal Tiger and a sixteen year old boy applying all that he has learnt about animals and zookeeping to save himself: at this point of the novel the scene is set for the most exhilarating experience of what Coleridge called “the willing suspension of disbelief.”

But this happens only once you are done with the quarter half of the novel. The question is how (without skipping the pages of course!) do you reach there? Many readers find the first half of the novel redundant, or think that the main attraction of the story has been delayed a little. Martel did, it seems, foresee the reactions. So he begins with a trick. Author’s note. That’s one. So this is a real story and there’s always room for real stories. And there’s another. A promise: “I have a story that will make you believe in god”. Atheists might take up the challenge. If these tricks don’t work for you, never mind. There’s lot more to appreciate Martel for.

Life of Pi has its charm in amusing situations (The strange origins of Pi Patel’s name, his efforts to live with it. witty asides), thoughtful meditations over metaphysical concepts( time, life, God), its take on religion, easily quotable sentences, funny and ingenious turn of phrases, its use of language, its insight into the animal psyche and not to forget its innovative technique. The novel poses many questions that lie at the heart of zoo keeping and animal training. At one point in the novel Pi remarks “well-meaning and misinformed people think animals in the wild are happy because they are free…it is captured by wicked men and thrown in jails….this is not the way it is…if an animal could choose with intelligence, it would opt for living in zoo, since the major difference between a zoo and the wild is the absence of enemy and parasites, abundance of food…”. and you could well relate yourself.

Martel’s meditative yet carefree prose subtly deals with complex questions lightheartedly. Mr. Kumar, Pi’s professor and a rationalist talks of the moment when he lost faith in god: “When I was your age, I lived in bed , racked with Polio. I asked myself everyday, ‘Where is God? Where is God?’ God never came. It wasn’t God who saved me. It was medicine”. Pi wonders “What a terrible disease that must be if it could kill God in man.”

Life of Pi is an adventure story with a difference. Like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, adventure is a mode to explore the recesses of a human mind. The novel opens itself to varied interpretations and can be applied to larger philosophical, social and universal context.

Read it but try escape the urge to google Pi Patel or the sinking of Tsimtsum.

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