I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I thought this book was too clever. Normally, I’m a big fan of clever –subtle hidden messages, extended allegories, clever names, social satire. I chuckled every time Neil Stephenson referenced his Snowcrash hero/protagonist, Hiro Protagonist. I read deeper messages about mid 20th century European politics into Lord of the Rings. I slogged through all of Moby Dick (OK, I skipped a few of the whale chapters). Plus, Life of Pi had the added bonus of being a Booker Prize winner – the Booker is awarded to the best full-length English novel by a writer in the British Commonwealth of Nations or Ireland – and I’m usually so cowed by the credentials of Booker winners that I’m willing to at least pretend I like their books, in casual conversations. I’m not sure I totally understood Ian McEwen’s Amsterdam (the 1997 winner), but I understood why it won.
But Life of Pi was unrelentingly clever, and it started to grate on my nerves. I wouldn’t want to ruin the plot, but I think I can safely give away information that’s revealed by the front cover illustration: it’s the story of a young Indian man, on his way to Canada, who is stranded on a life boat in the middle of the Pacific with a Bengal tiger. But before we get to the meat of the story – and it was certainly a tasty plot turn, and a great idea for a novel – we have to sit through a fictional “author’s note” at the beginning, in which we are supposed to believe that the author actually met the protagonist and learned the story through him, a pretense maintained in intervals throughout the book without, in my opinion, much pay off character-development-wise. Martel also takes the first quarter of the book to let Pi expound on his religious philosophies, taking the reader aside to explain how Islam “is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion” (p.61), that “The presence of God is the finest of rewards” (p. 63), that “it is on the inside that God must be defended, not he outside…religion is about our dignity, not our depravity” (p.71). Martel seems to trying to coerce the reader into understanding the rest of the book as some kind of religious experience, but I found his machinations a bit heavy handed.
Once the book gets to the lifeboat, things definitely pick up and Martel’s tight, matter-of-fact prose style captures Pi’s terror and exhaustion quite well. Since the book is told mostly in the first person, the absolute clarity with which Pi recounts his horrors gives the reader a glimpse of the man he has become after this ordeal, as well. But Martel is not done with plots twists and turns, I think to the book’s detriment. I suppose this means my place on the Booker committee is getting revoked, but I think if you want to read a clever piece about tigers, you’d do just as well to stick with “The Lady or the Tiger.”