Trevor's Reviews > Life of Pi

I found a lot of this book incredibly tedious. I tend to avoid the winners of the Man / Booker – they make me a little depressed. The only Carey I haven’t liked won the Booker (Oscar and Lucinda), I really didn’t like the little bit of Vernon God Little I read and I never finished The Sea despite really liking Banville’s writing. So, being told a book is a winner of the Booker tends to be a mark against it from the start, unfortunately.

I’m going to have to assume you have read this book, as if I don’t I won’t be able to say anything about it at all. Apparently, when Yann Martel wrote this he was feeling a bit down and this was his way of plucking himself up. Well, good on him. That’s just great. I was a little annoyed when I found out that the person the book is dedicated to had also written a story about a man in a boat with a wild cat and had considered suing for plagiarism.

The book is written by a member of that class of people who are my least favourite; a religious person who cannot conceive of someone not being religious. There is some fluff at the start in which atheism is ‘discussed’ (read, discarded) as something people inevitably give up on with their dying breath. But the religious are generally terribly arrogant, so it is best not to feel insulted by their endless insults – they know not what they do.

Parts of this were so badly over written that it was almost enough to make me stop reading. The bit where he is opening his first can of water is a case in point. This takes so long and is so incidental to the story and written in such a cutesy way that I started to pray the boat would sink, the tiger would get him … I would even have accepted God smiting him at this point as a valid plotting point, even if (or particularly because) it would bring the story to an abrupt end.

This is a book told as two possible stories of how a young man survives for 227 days floating across the Pacific Ocean told in 100 chapters. That was the other thing that I found annoying – much is made of the fact this story is told in 100 chapters – but I could not feel any necessity for many of the chapters. Just as I could not feel any necessity for the Italic voice that sounded like Tom Waits doing, “What is he building in there?” Well, except to introduce us again to Pi some number of years later. You know, in Invisible Cities Calvino has necessary chapters – this book just has 100 chapters. It was something that annoyed me from early on in the book – that the chapters seemed far too arbitrary and pointing it out at the end just made me more irritated. There may well be some Hindu reason for 100 chapters – but like Jesus ticking off the ancient prophecies on his way to martyrdom, I still couldn’t see why these chapters were needed in themselves.

Pi is the central character in the book who, for some odd reason, is named after a swimming pool – I started playing with the ideas of swimming pools and oceans in my head to see where that might lead, but got bored. He is an active, practicing member of three of the world’s major religions. There is a joke in the early part of the book about him possibly becoming Jewish (ha ha – or perhaps I should draw a smiley face?). The only religion missing entirely from the book is Buddhism. Well, when I say entirely, it is interesting that it is a Japanese ship that sinks and that the people Pi tells his story to are Japanese engineers. I’ve known Hindus who consider Buddhists to be little more than dirty, filthy atheists – so perhaps that is one reason why these Japanese engineers are treated with such contempt at the end of the book.

The Japanese make the connections between the two stories – but we can assume that they stuff up these connections. While it is clear the French Cook is the hyena, Pi’s mum is the orang-utang, and the Asian gentleman is the zebra, I’m not convinced Pi is meant to be the tiger. In fact, the one constant (that’s a pun, by the way, you are supposed to be laughing) in both stories in Pi.

My interpretation is that the tiger is actually God. Angry, jealous, vicious, hard to appease, arbitrary and something that takes up lots of time when you have better things to do – sounds like God to me.

The last little bit of the book has Pi asking which is the better story- the one with animals or the one he tells with people. I mean, this is an unfair competition – he has spent chapter after chapter telling the animal story and only the last couple telling the people story. The point of this, though, is Pascal’s wager said anew. If we can never really know if there is no god and it ultimately makes no difference if we tell the story with him or without him in it, but if the story is more beautiful with him in it – then why not just accept him in the story and be damned.

Well, because the story isn’t improved with the animals and life isn’t just a story and kid’s stories are great sometimes, but I often like adult stories at least as much – and sometimes even more.

This is yet another person all alone survival story, but one I don’t feel that was handled as well as it could have been – mostly because the writer had an ideological message that he felt was more important than the story – never a good sign. Worse still, in the end I really couldn’t care less about Pi – I knew he was going to survive and knew it would be ‘because of’ his faith.

He does talk about Jesus’ most petulant moment with the fig tree – so I was quite impressed that rated a mention – but, all the same, I haven’t been converted to any or all of the world religions discussed in this book.

Compare this tale with the bit out of A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters about the painting – I know, it is not a fair comparison, Barnes is a god, but I’ve made it anyway.

I didn’t really enjoy this book, I felt it tried too hard and didn’t quite make it. But Christians will love it – oh yeah – Christians will definitely love it.