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Life Of Pi

by Yann Martel

Canongate $202

A TEENAGER AND a tiger at sea on a lifeboat sounds like the set-up for a joke. But it's a cartoon image that Yann Martel has gracefully extended into a strange, mostly serious, tale of survival.

At first glance, Life Of Pi is yet another Indian novel. This one, though, is written by the Spanish-born son of Canadian diplomats whose peripatetic life has produced two previous and completely non-Indian books: a collection of short stories, Facts Behind The Helsinki Roccamatios, and a novel, Self.

In an endearing author's note to the new novel, Martel describes the failure of Self and of his attempts to write a novel about Portugal while living in India. It was a story told to him by an old Indian man, and his meeting with the protagonist of the story, that inspired Life Of Pi.

So is this fiction about a real life? Whatever facts Martel began with, he has imagined them into a clever and sometimes dreamlike tale. It is more tempting to believe he is playing postmodern games with his readers, asking us to believe him while inventing wildly.

What matters is that we travel happily along, as I did. The journey begins in Pondicherry, India's former French territory, where Piscine Molitor Patel (named after a swimming pool and preferring Pi, with its mathematical connotation) learns to swim, 'collects' religions and observes the animals in the zoo run by his father. Our narrator is both an oddball and a philosopher.

Much of the novel's first part is given to his ruminations about the zoo's inhabitants, a digest of recent popular texts on animal behaviour. If you like that kind of thing, it's quite fascinating; anyway, keep in mind that his musings will later save his life. When India is in turmoil in 1977, the family and its animals set out on a cargo ship for Canada. Suddenly, the ship sinks and only Pi survives, flung into a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan and a tiger.

Soon the story settles into a delicate power struggle between Pi and the seasick tiger, named Richard Parker due to a paperwork error.

As Pi puts it, their existence is 'a state of tense, breathless boredom' and that is an apt description of the long middle section of the book.

Little happens in the true sense of action: the boat drifts in an endless sea for 227 days. Yet the moments are vividly recounted, alive with flying fish and raft building and the many ways a tiger growls. Our involvement comes from a disbelief that Pi can survive thirst, starvation and confinement with an equally desperate killer.

Occasionally, I wondered why I did not feel his plight more deeply; my appreciation was mainly intellectual. We know from the outset that Pi lived, of course, and I found a minor irritation in the intrusive, italicised passages about the author's visits to interview him.

There is also the distance created by Martel's wave of a magic realist wand over the story. But while Pi's world becomes less and less recognisable - hallucination or just unexplored places? - his story remains convincing.

Also in his author's note, Martel recalls a friend's observation that Indians spoke a funny English, using words such as 'bamboozle'.

Martel himself used that word to good effect in India, asking a clerk at a train station: 'I didn't think the fare would be so expensive. You're not trying to bamboozle me, are you?' The clerk smilingly replied: 'No sir! There is no bamboozlement here. I have quoted you the correct fare.'

While this anecdote tickled me, I was pleased that Pi did not speak like a comic-book Indian. His voice is cool and reflective, his language understated, even when events are horrific.

The end result is that Martel has written an original, sometimes droll, sometimes baffling meditation - as much essay as novel - on power, compassion and the realisation that we are all animals when we need to be.



Magical meditation on life