LIFE OF PI, BY YANN MARTEL

Trusted sources have both encouraged me to and dissuaded me from reading this book, the latter mostly founded on reports of over religiosity. Well, one of the former sources finally just foisted it into my hands, so I gave it a try.

It’s a strangely structured book. A good third of it focuses on the Pi’s upbringing in India and his concurrent adoption of Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, his fascination with the animals in his father’s zoo, the origin of his unusual name, etc, etc. Unremarkable childhood recollections blended with spiritual pseudo-screed.

Then the book changes completely, as Pi becomes stranded in a lifeboat amid the vast Pacific with a blood-thirsty Bengal tiger for company. The descriptions of his survival at sea occupy most of the remainder of the book, and they are surprisingly prosaic given the somewhat whimsical, too-cute style of the first portion in India. Pi learns to fish. Pi learns how to get fresh water. Pi builds a raft. Pi tames the tiger. It could be Hatchet in a boat. Toward the end when Pi begins to fade, events take a turn for the fantastic again, but strangely never go for the sort of magical realism quasi-fantastic stuff I was expecting. The tiger never actually talks to him. He doesn’t have any out of body experiences. He encounters a floating island that would seem more at home in Kim Stanley Robinson than Salman Rushdie.

The book ends with a slim denouement in which two Japanese men from the company that owned the ship on which Pi sank interview him to find out why it sank. They don’t believe his story, so he tells them another one, involving fewer improbably animals and more human intrigue. When he’s finished, he asks them (Japanese in bold, English in plain),

‘So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with the animals or the story without animals?’
Mr. Okamoto: ‘That’s an interesting question…’
Mr. Chiba: “The story with animals.’
Mr. Okamoto: ‘Yes. The story with animals is the better story.’
Pi Patel: ‘Thank you. And so it goes with God.’
[Silence]
Mr. Chiba: “What did he just say?‘
Mr. Okamoto: ‘I don’t know.‘
Mr. Chiba: ‘Oh look – he’s crying.‘
[Long silence]

I’m assuming this statement is supposed to tie up the religiosity of the beginning with the survival epic of the middle with the semi-allegorical scifi of the late middle. Part of me wants to go back and reread the beginning to root out thematic details, but I just don’t remember it being interesting enough to bother. Pi loves God, and more specifically loves religion, but he survives his ordeal more out of will than faith. Also, he loves animals, and people, others and himself, which combine to make him a pretty uninteresting character.

Hm, writing that out didn’t help me reach any conclusions. Gr. I guess I would rate this book as merely ok.