Shipwrecked and then trapped on a tiny boat with no hope of rescue, just acres of sea and sky as far as the eye can see is a nightmare situation. Eileen Battersby reviews Life of Pi, by Yann Martel.
Many castaways drift towards a slow death of starvation and exposure, the waiting invariably monitored by watching sharks. Yet resourceful and/or lucky survivors over the centuries such as Pi have had miraculous yarns to tell.
Surviving a shipwreck is one of those compelling life experiences that has often featured in fiction, man facing the sea and himself. Except in Pi's case there's an added menace, he had to share an admittedly well-equipped life-boat - and supplies - with a restless adult Royal Bengal tiger.
Our hero is the younger son of an Indian zoo owner. When Mrs Gandhi came to power, the boy's father feared what could come next, "Soon she'll come down to our zoo and tell us that her jails are full, she needs more space. Could she put Desai [an opposition politician\] with the lions?" It was decided to sell off some of the animals and then take the others off to a new life in Canada. It all sounds very exciting. However, "things didn't turn out the way they were supposed to", recalls Pi with hindsight, "but what can you do?".
Martel prefaces his narrative through another voice, that of a struggling writer who admits to having been told this story of a lifetime by an old man in a coffee shop. Obviously intrigued, the novelist then visits Pi Patel, the central character, to discover at first hand exactly what happened during those long months afloat in a lifeboat. It proves quite a story, surreally beautiful as well as so strange and appalling it's impossible not to feel it is true.
Patel, the survivor, now a grown man, married and approaching 40, possesses the calmness of one who has suffered and still lives with the memories. As a child he had been named after a swimming pool and was taught to swim by an old champion. Initially teased by his school mates, Pi gradually learns to defend himself through logic. His deliberate, practical approach to existence and his faith in several Gods will come in useful.
Life of Pi is black magic and reality, a subtle and sophisticated fable about belief in its many guises. First published in Canada where the Spanish-born, Montreal-based Martel now lives, this handsome UK edition, from Edinburgh's often excellent Canongate publishers is daring, original and curiously philosophical. It is one boy's story shaped by adventure and allegory with echoes of works as diverse in literary tradition as Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea. Pi is both witness and hero, he describes the most shocking events with a gracious formality and immense attention to often gory detail.
In truth, Pi sounds more like a Victorian gentleman explorer than a 1970s teenager. Still, his story is terrifying and believable as well as lucidly told. Pi's gentle, insistent voice is compelling; this is an atmospheric, read-at-one-sitting novel. The heat, the smells, the giddy fear and the desperate diet that somehow sustain the boy's courage are vividly and dramatically evoked by Martel who never permits the slightest faltering of the tension within which the story develops. Most successful of all is the description of the boy's complicated terror, and gradual need, of the tiger.
Pi's fascination with his magnificent and dangerous ship mate develops into a complex psychological war devised upon territory, power and food.
Even before the family arrive on ship with a cargo of wild animals, Pi had been introduced to barbaric realities. "We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man. In a general way we mean how our species' excessive predatoriness has made the entire planet our prey." This is a statement of general fact. But then he goes on to list the vicious obituary of zoo animals "that have died from being fed foreign bodies" - from razors, to broken glass and safety pins, not to mention torments such as a zebra stabbed with a sword and other assaults on other animals "with walking sticks, umbrellas, hairpins, knitting needles, scissors and whatnot, often with an aim to taking an eye out". Pi's father once taught him and his brother a cruel lesson about the dangers of engaging with wild animals. On taking the boys to the family zoo one morning, he leads them to a tiger's compound into which a goat is thrown.
Death is instant and, although Pi had his eyes covered, having only heard the killing was lesson enough. From early in the narrative Martel reveals a gift for observing wild animals, particularly those who have lived in captivity.
There is nothing sentimental about his approach, he also manages sufficiently to control his outrage at man's treatment of wild animals to make several important points with becoming either pedantic or campaigning.
Once disaster strikes, events happen quickly. The cargo ship is taking water and will sink. Thrown overboard by crew members, Pi assesses his situation: "I was alone and orphaned, in the middle of the Pacific, hanging on to an oar, an adult tiger in front of me, sharks beneath me, a storm raging about me. Had I considered my prospects in the light of reason, I surely would have given up and let go of the oar, hoping that I might drown before being eaten." For all the Conradian horror, the narrative is often horribly funny, even to the explanation behind the name 'Richard Parker'. The tiger, an extraordinary characterisation, becomes extremely important not only to the narrative, but also to Pi and his approach to survival. Boy and big cat are the uneasy co-travellers, but there are also other castaways, such as an injured zebra, a hyena and a female orang-utan clearly suffering from seasickness.
The hyena soon finishes off the gallant zebra and the orang-utan, and in turn is despatched by the tiger. All of these sequences are wonderfully described. The physical and the psychological walk hand-in-hand throughout the novel.
By the close, Pi has endured 227 days at sea which also include a brief stay on a bizarre island that becomes deadly at night. Faced with pain and suffering, the stoic Pi, having lost his parents and his brother, learns to kill and also to rely on himself. Yet almost more importantly, he depends on the strange bond he forms with the tiger. No, this is not Disney - reality, ordinary behaviour and regret, not fantasy, dictate at the end.
An unsettling ambiguity finally creeps into the story when two loss adjustors searching for meaning, and the interpretation most likely to mean something to them, seek a second version of the events. Pi obliges. Martel cleverly leaves us wondering if we have read an adventure or a parable, or possibly both. Booker judges capable of appreciating an imagination in full flight need look no further.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Life of Pi. By Yann Martel. Canongate. 319 pp, 12.99 sterling