The year's Man Booker prize winner, Yann Martel tells Aida Edemariam how he came to write his winning novel about a boy on a lifeboat with a tiger.
Yann Martel says he doesn't like exoticism in fiction and finds weirdness fatiguing. Which is pretty weird, given that he has just won the Man Booker Prize with a story about a Hindu Christian Muslim boy who spends nearly a year on a lifeboat in the Pacific with a Bengal tiger. Yet his attitude is probably the reason why his novel, Life of Pi - a playful, thought-provoking amalgam of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Old Man and the Sea and The Jungle Book - works so well.
"My narrator isn't weird," insists Martel. "He's an ordinary boy, simple and approachable. I like normality that suffers trial." And anyway, if you spend long enough with someone, exoticism wears off. "Everyone's the same, but they express their sameness in different ways."
Martel has had lots of practice seeing through foreignness. His parents were Canadian diplomats, and he caught the nomadic bug: he's made lengthy travels all around the world. Now he's living in Berlin, but Montreal, where his parents have settled, is his base. "I'm Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point."
It is the reference point in Life of Pi, too: Pi's family, who are zookeepers, are emigrating to Canada with some animals they have sold to US zoos when their ship sinks, with a "monstrous metallic burp". Martel is not a small man, but his blue trenchcoat makes him look slight. He's quick-moving, quick-talking, gentle and a little fey, but not at all shy. We're at London Zoo, and he's interested in everything (he has to be dragged away from the slumped figure of a gorilla). He's chatting to everyone, discussing tiger diets and mating habits with a keeper who is feeding two Sumatran tigers, Lumpa and Raika, from a bucket of horsemeat.
Martel didn't intend to be a writer, but he found himself following his father, who, as well as being a diplomat is an award-winning Quebecois poet. (Both parents now work as literary translators and are currently translating Life of Pi into French.) Initially, Martel wanted to be a politician and also toyed with anthropology and philosophy. Then he wrote "a couple of bad plays, some bad short stories, and a bad novel", and was hooked on the family trade. It was during the writing of that first novel, Self, that he began to be interested in religion and faith, preoccupations unfashionably central to Life of Pi. A key scene in Self is a rape, written in a woman's voice. "But once I'd done that, I thought, where do you go? Where do you go after such a soul-destroying experience? How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence," he says.
He is clear about what he sees as the difference between faith and belief. "Fanatics do not have faith - they have belief," he says. "With faith, you let go. You trust. Whereas with belief you cling."
Then the novelist comes through. "One of the things I discovered, reading the founding texts of Islam, Christianity, Hinduism - a good religion works like a good novel: it makes you suspend your disbelief," he says.
His second novel didn't work. He had gone to India intending to write it, but it came apart, and he discarded it. In the author's note to Life of Pi, the only real person is the unlikely-sounding Moacyr Scliar, a Brazilian novelist. "Ten years ago, I read a review of one of his books in the New York Times; a very lukewarm review by John Updike. The book was about a Jew who ends up in a lifeboat with a black panther. I remember thinking, man, that's a brilliant premise." Then he found himself in India, at a loss, needing a story.
"I was 34, had written two books which hadn't sold. I'd constructed nothing in my life, really. Then I remembered this premise. And suddenly big chunks of the novel came together very quickly." ("Initially the main animal was going to be a small Indian elephant. But that was too comical. Then I thought of an Indian rhino. But it was too stiff - there's too little you can do with a rhino, and it's a herbivore. I couldn't see how I could have a herbivore survive in the Pacific.")
Life of Pi, as published in Britain, is different from the first Canadian edition. He was initially convinced people would be "allergic to religious talk", and delayed talking about Pi's conversions to Islam and Christianity; this interfered with the story's chronology and his British and American editors found it confusing. They persuaded him to trust himself, to have faith. So some of the opening chapters have been reorganised.
What Martel does trust is his sense of what novels should be. "To some extent, you must blame writers who write books that are too hermetic. I like simplicity. Maybe it's a reflection of a limitation on my part, but Gunter Grass - I can't read him, he's too complicated and dense. I can't even finish Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. I write simple books and I view my readers as my equals. In a novel you must amuse as you elevate. You mustn't be too much of a storyteller, because the reader feels kidnapped, taken in but left with nothing. You have to be a bit challenging. You really have to do a bit of everything. And at the end of the day people do come back to art. I see this in palliative care" - once a week Martel volunteers in a palliative care unit - "No one on their deathbed says: 'I wish I'd watched more television, or I wish I'd worked more.'"
Martel has already begun work on his next novel, which is again an exotic attempt to answer an ordinary question: how do you deal with evil? It features "a monkey and a donkey travelling a country - a real country, like what we have here, with trees and people and rain - but it's also a huge shirt. They're making their way to the capital of the shirt, which is called Yellow Star because of the shape of the fortifications and the colour of the bricks. It'll become obvious that it's the shirt of a Jew during the Nazi era." - (Guardian Service)
Life of Pi by Yann Martel is published in the UK by Canongate