28 NOV 2012
Life of Pi
Yann Martel welcomes the reader to his first wildly successful novel with a rare glimpse into the sacred space of an author’s creative process in the Author’s Note. We find him plagued with writer’s block and traipsing aimlessly around India seeking inspiration. Questioning his legitimacy within a now doubted career choice as a writer, he stumbles across an elderly Indian man who, upon discovering Mr. Martel’s true profession, offers up a story purported to “make him believe in God.” The story that follows is the life of Pi – an Indian boy who we meet as a school boy growing up in Pondicherry living and playing at the zoo which his family owns. Make sure you read the author’s note for one important reason: It sets the stage for the following story as a reasonable, logical, and true series of events. You may find it hard to believe otherwise.
In part one we meet Piscine ‘Pi’ Patel in his boyhood as told from his first-person perspective, interspersed with brief chapters relating Mr. Martel’s interview with the adult Mr. Patel now living in Canada with his wife and children. These bits add more to our understanding of the character of Pi, and we begin to see through the lens of his dual education in zoology and religious studies. Further glimpses into his childhood add the revelation that
his courses of study are simply the extension of his natural perspective on life. Having grown up in a zoo, all of life relates to animals. Having grown up in India, all of life relates to religion. Mr. Martel effectively weaves these two lenses to juxtapose and compliment one another so that our perspective is such at the beginning of part two that we can understand (and believe) just how a teenage boy can survive the better part of year crossing the Pacific ocean alone in a lifeboat with an adult Bengal tiger (don’t worry, this gives away nothing more than the cover). Belief, we will eventually find, is more the point of the story than adventure. As we learn about young Pi growing up in south-eastern India we are introduced to belief as a virtue in and of itself. Pi (unbelievably) embraces not only Hinduism as his natural religious upbringing, but also converts to Christianity and Islam without neglecting his other faiths. Agnosticism, on the other hand, is regarded as an inferior belief system even to atheism as it is, in fact, a non-belief system. Pi imagines the end of an agnostic’s life as dry and unimaginative: ”I can well imagine an atheist’s last words: ‘White, white! L-L-Love! My God!’-and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, ‘Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain,’ and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.“
An incredible story is indeed what we find when Pi’s family packs up the zoo up and heads for Canada. It isn’t long before the ship sinks and Pi finds himself the sole human survivor aboard a small life boat with Richard Parker, the tiger. Using a combination of his knowledge of animal hierarchy and his fishing luck he manages to not be eaten by Richard Parker and establishing himself as the Alpha animal. The rest of their journey is fraught with fanciful events and incredible discoveries beautifully written by Mr. Martel. Our resolve to believe and enjoy our belief of the unbelievable is tested. Pi of course makes it across the Pacific (how else would we have the story?) and is confronted by investigators seeking to discover the cause of the shipwreck. His interviewers are less inclined to believe his amazing story, and so he offers them an alternative version. This less desirable story has far fewer animals and a far greater degree of human depravity. Mr. Martel leaves us with two versions of the same story and a choice:
“Which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?”
“The story with animals.”
“And so it goes with God.”