Book Review: Life of Pi by Yann Martel (2001); also, a quibble with Wikipedia

Piscine Molitor Patel, who calls himself Pi, is the son of an Indian zookeeper who decides to move his family and business to Canada. But a storm sinks their Japanese ship on the Pacific, and Pi finds himself in a lifeboat with only a hyena, a zebra, and an orangutan for company. But there is a stowaway he does not see at first: Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. The food chain runs itself through in miniature, and soon there are only Pi and Richard Parker left. Pi, who is so passionate about religion that he had become a Christian and a Muslim on top of his original Hinduism, is driven to a predatory standoff with this killer carnivore and an even bigger predator: the sea itself. From this focal point of human debasement, with no civilization surrounding himself, Pi must adapt his self-understanding and his vision of God in order to tame the tiger, the sea, and his inexorable hopelessness.

I have a weakness for viewing with skepticism books I am told I will enjoy. First there was the Academy for the film adaptation, and then there was my mother, who told me that it would change my life. Suppressing my instinct to run from relevancy, I gave it a chance instead. I guess I'm growing up.

My first problem was with Martel's style. A recent semester full of German modernists and feminist critics left me with a bristling offense at flashy metaphors and improbable outcomes. And although the book has helped speed my recovery from those, the grouchiest writers in town, I still hold to my belief that Martel is a little too scintillating for his own good. This is more of a problem early in the story, mostly in descriptions of the zoo itself. And it certainly doesn't kill the book for me; I understand that Martel was struggling as a writer before this, and wanted to grab his audience in the way we all must try to do. I also understand that a lackluster description of zoo animals and competing religions would be quite a failure. All this is to say kindly that the book does not take on its substance until the lifeboat, at which point it comes alive.

At that point, Martel strikes a balance with the narrative flow, the story, and the deeper subjects that I would be glad to carry for a page; he carries it along for more than a hundred pages. As I pointed out of Peter Beagle, a story often does better with a few themes and little action rather than cramming as much as it can into every page. Pi's thoughts of God, of hope, and of keeping himself and Richard Parker alive are exactly enough to float the story along without sinking it. And Martel does all this without intruding with his own voice, and without losing Pi's perspective as a sixteen year-old.

Now I come to a problem not with the book, but with a less-refined unit of culture: the book's Wikipedia article. More specifically, it's the first sentence that has me rankled, and that points to something more significant than this corner of the internet. Our qualified editors list Life of Pi, in the first sentence most moviegoers will read instead of the book's reviews, as a fantasy adventure novel. To this I adamantly object. I'm always ranting about the degradation of fantasy, but this is an entirely different tiger. This is the same kind of arrogant disregard that shelves rock band Jukebox the Ghost's first two albums as "oddball science fiction."

What causes people to reshape fantasy in illogical ways? This is not a rhetorical question. Nor is it insignificant, even for people with no interest in fantasy. It seems to be a feature of my generation and those slightly older, perhaps by as much as two decades. The real problem, I suspect, goes very far back. Three forces that were once inseparable now stand at opposite corners of the room, waging war of attrition on each other. This triumvirate is science, politics, and religion. Each of these is flattening, which is why they have separated; science no longer means method, as it once did, a process for discovering the truth, which is never completed. Now it's used as a substitute for "truth," to which politics and religion now aspire, too. But tell a stranger that truth has nothing to do with method, or with government, or with faith, and maybe they'll write you off as a religious zealot, or a communist atheist, or a Tea Party member, or whatever already falls into their framework of the enemy, who disagrees with their Truth.

Into this cold war steps fantasy, because these quibbles aren't enough to make the stable minority stop reading Tolkien. Fantasy is not Truth, but it's harmless enough, because we already have enough superheroes and wizards to make room for one more at a time. That's what I think fantasy is for the unwitting: a harmless, entertaining adversary. By dispensing with scientific explanation, it presents no danger of discovering a new scientific law that dispenses with the old (even though this is the original purpose of science). Its kings resemble medieval monarchies, and its gods are insignificant. Its only use is a vehicle for sex and violence, and we are only decadent Romans.

The problem for the layman is that metaphor itself is hauled to the trash with fantasy. Jukebox the Ghost should take "oddball" as a compliment, although I don't think it was meant that way. But the band's only scraps of science fiction are mentions of the apocalypse, of God, and one lyric that says "strange fish I've never seen," referring to an inter-dimensional storm. To a culture so hampered by such revolutionary lyrics as "whoa, sometimes I get a feeling," maybe Jukebox is too much of a shock to the system.

Or it could be an excess of individualism. If it can't happen within the scope of my life's experience, can it happen at all?

My approach is neither revolutionary nor sufficiently reactionary, but I think it needs to begin. After all, Life of Pi concludes with a scene which I will not spoil here, but which calls into question the ethics and logic of rational belief. It's Martel's best point: we should accept that most of life lies beyond the scope of our individual perception. It's okay to doubt. More audacious would be to declare irrevocably that a thing does not exist, or worse, that this means we should take no notice of it. To do so would be to ignore the Bengal in the lifeboat.

Review: A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle (1960)

Compared with the Resurrection of Christ, Tolkien's Return of the King, or Grover Cleveland's second election, my return to internet regularity is duly humbled. Nevertheless, I'm back! If you look, you'll notice there's something different about me: I now have a bachelor's in English literature. Thus I come triumphantly down the mountain to do the only thing for which this degree qualifies me: writing this blog.

Into the fray comes Peter S. Beagle, author of The Last Unicorn, one of the cornerstones of my pantheon of fantasy books. I present A Fine and Private Place.

Michael Morgan is a newlydead who wakes up in his grave to discover that Hades is not a netherworld of fire and physical torture, but the next stage of being in which the consciousness gradually forgets all vestiges of its past life. A stubborn narcissist at heart, he struggles with all his will to remain as human as he can, although only a few people can see or hear him. These include a sarcastic raven, a tragic young ghost named Laura, and Mr. Rebeck, a wispy little man who hasn't left the Bronx cemetery for nineteen years. Eternity is put to the test when Mr. Rebeck begins to flirt with Mrs. Klapper, a feisty woman visiting her husband's morgue. Michael and Laura work and talk to discover whether even death can span the abyss that separates people's true experiences from each other's.

The main thing that attracts me to Beagle's books is his ability to stand somewhere very humble and do great things. Not every book has to be Narnia or try to contain the entire scope of human morality within a single adventure. In plain words, the book's three themes as I see them--death, love, and human decency--look like impossibly high mountains of rich thought. But so many fantasy books try to leap such heights, and so many, that there's room only for a single one-liner for each. Not so with Beagle. The narrative perspective leaves the cemetery only a handful of times, and so little happens in the plot, that there's plenty of room for wisdom. But don't let the slow speed of the action fool you. The ongoing dialogue, especially its hopes and doubts, is better than a sword fight. To me, that's an art to which any writer should aspire.

Beagle also scores points in my book with the freshness of his writing. Each of the characters has a voice, and the voices dance with each other in a way that illuminates real conversation rather than setting it up as something quippy, narcissistic, and unrealistic, as modern movie audiences seem to want. Beyond that, his description is simple but catching. It makes you want to slow down and appreciate it.

Unless you're looking for wild adventure, read this book. It has neither real thrills nor spills, but it's as thought-provoking as they come and easy to follow.