Lions, tigers and God

>> Yann Martel's Life of Pi is a wild, wild ride

by JULIET WATERS

Life of Pi, Montrealer Yann Martel's second novel, makes an ambitious claim. This is a "story that will make you believe in God." I won't say whether it achieves that goal. But I will say that it made me believe that a lame first novel can be followed by a killer second one.

Self, Martel's first novel, suffered from a bad case of over achievement. A pastiche of autobiography and post-modern plot twists, it was haunted by an off-putting tone of smug precociousness. As Martel writes in an author's note, "reviewers were puzzled, or damned it with faint praise. Then readers ignored it. Despite my best efforts at playing the clown or the trapeze artist, the media circus made no difference. The book did not move. Books lined the shelves of bookstores like kids standing in a row to play baseball or soccer, and mine was the gangly, unathletic kid that no one wanted on their team. It vanished quickly and quietly."

But much has changed in popular taste in the five years since Self came out. Pomo gimmickry has given way to Harry Potter mania. In many ways, Life of Pi is a good old-fashioned boy's book full of survival, cannibalism, horror, math and zoology. An impressive marriage of The Jungle Book with Lord of the Flies, it's the harrowing coming of age tale of a boy who survives for over a year in a lifeboat with a zebra, an orangutan, an hyena and a Bengal tiger.

If you're not a fan of the precious, quirky anecdote, then the promise of irrefutable proof of God may be a good carrot to lead you through the first part to the brutal sea voyage of the second. Almost everything about Pi's life seems to be an excuse for a weird little story.

Pi was named after a swimming pool, explaining his full name, Piscine Molitor Patel. He trained his teachers and classmates to change his nickname, Piss, to Pi. A tiger at the zoo Pi's father runs ends up being named Richard Parker. The cumulative effect of these cute stories can be a little cloying.

The only event in Pi's early life that prepares us for the horror to come, is when Pi's father decides to instill a healthy fear of the more dangerous animals by forcing his vegetarian son to watch a tiger mutilate a goat. Pi is such a gentle, harmless soul that he joins three religions, becoming a faithful Hindu, Christian and Muslim. A good thing, since he will eventually need all the help he can get.

When the Patels decide to move from India to Canada they accompany the zoo animals on a Japanese cargo ship bound for Winnipeg. When the ship sinks, Pi finds himself to be the only human survivor and a struggling link in the food chain.

We watch the pious, naïve Pi go from fragile, strict vegetarian to wily, cunning survivor. From a boy who is terrified of killing a fish to a man who dines on shark pups and finds "that stabbing them through the eyes with the knife was a faster, less tiresome way of killing them than hacking at the tops of their heads with the hatchet." And to a man capable of taming a Bengal tiger, after watching the slow, torturous deaths of the other three animals.

If Pi is a tamer of tigers, then Martel is a tamer of reality. That he manages to tell this ambitious, demanding tale in such a way that the novel requires only the slightest suspension of disbelief is remarkable. He captures the terror, the loneliness, the gore and the madness. He then rewards the audience with just enough humour to keep them from turning away.

Some readers may find that the ending turns them more into agnostics than believers. But most will just find the voyage is reward enough. :

Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Knopf, hc, 354pp, $32.95