September 2005    

Life of Pi: a Novel Author: Yann Martel Publisher: Harcourt Trade $25.00 Cloth (319 P.) ISBN: 0151008116 B&T         YBP Reviewed by Gary Shirk, President and Chief Operating Officer To be the last person in North America to read The Life of Pi would have been a shame. So, in an airport somewhere I don't remember and wouldn't matter, I pulled the colorful paperback down from the shelf and began to read. I am naturally skeptical of award winners. Too many great books are overlooked and too many win awards because the publisher hired a superior publicist. The Life of Pi, however, is not one of these books. My skepticism dissolved while reading the author's note which launches the novel. I was struck at once by his honesty. But I'm a sucker for honest writing, especially honesty in fiction which, of course, is the best sort of all. The Life of Pi is about a Canadian man, an immigrant from India, who remembers a boyhood tragedy that thrust him---against all odds--- into a lifeboat on the open sea with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a tiger for over six months. It is a story of survival, of triumph of the human spirit over nature. It's also a story about zoo management and animal behavior, about religion and human behavior, and more fundamentally, about the way of God and his creations. But, maybe most of all, it is a story about telling the truth. Even before the story, comes the language. Yann Martel is a master writer, whose command of English is so strong that he infuses even the simplest sentence with the majesty of Pacific Ocean sunsets and the rich spice of Indian cuisine. Images fall one upon another, and concepts collide in a wonderful pastiche, creating a unique, quirky, magical world. It's a world in which unexpected and mysterious insights emerge from mundane observations on the behavior of animals and men. Martel begins the book with a long description of the behavior of the tree-toed sloth which moves so slowly that predators, tuned to catch the movement of their prey, mistake it for the branch of the tree. The sloth hangs upside down on its branch, making a business of doing nothing, sometimes just feet away from certain death. Juxtaposed with this detailed, scientific exploration, the narrator observes, "The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity---it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud." Maybe this, too, is why science sticks so closely to poetry in this dense, superbly written novel. The Life of Pi, is a story about a boy who is uprooted from his native India, survives a shipwreck at sea, loses all his family, overcomes impossible odds to survive 227 days at sea in a 28 foot life boat in the company of a 450 pound Bengal tiger, and finally washes up on a remote shore of Mexico's Pacific coast. From bow to stern, it is a novel filled with narrative gems, such as the story of how the boy came to be christened Piscine Molitor Patel, named after the Olympic swimming pool in Paris once frequented by an old family friend. Then there's young Patel, who, after suffering the embarrassment of being called "Pissing" Patel by other school children, grasps the opportunity of attending a new school to rechristen himself "Pi" as in π = 3.14, achieving peace in an irrational number. Later, when his mother challenges his unrealistic commitment to three contentious religions by saying, "Father and I find your religious zeal a bit of a mystery," Pi responds simply, "It is a Mystery." Such treasures litter the book. When he tells how a hyena attacks the zebra whose leg was shattered jumping into the life boat, he adopts the tone of a naturalist, describing the most horrific action with quiet detachment. It's like watching the assault of Normandy in the film "Saving Private Ryan" with the sound turned off. When he dips into the science of animal psychology to relate how he used the life boat's motion to train the tiger, it is less science than survivorship born in fear and desperation. When he finally explains to skeptical officials of the Maritime Department in the Japanese Ministry of Transport how he came to be the only survivor of the Japanese ship Tsimtsum, he tells two stories. The first is the one we've learned in the 99 previous chapters--a story filled with imagination and meaning--and the second is filled with "dry, yeastless factuality." The officials conclude that a reasonable person could believe neither. But then Patel asks, "Yes, but which is the better story?" The Life of Pi is a teeter-totter book comprised of exactly 100 chapters. Its balance point is found early, in Chapter 22, whose single paragraph bears significance you cannot guess until the book comes to an end, and whose full meaning, even then, seems to lie just out of reach like a mirage on a hot summer day. The Life of Pi is no appetizer of a book, but rather a seven course meal served with a fine, rich, intoxicating wine-an experience that is occasionally dulling, often mystifying, sometimes dizzying, and in the end both troubling and profoundly satisfying. 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