Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Four years ago I bought a copy of Life of Pi by Yann Martel at a time when I was trying to read more modern fiction and prize winners. I remember loving it. I loved it so much that I recommended it to others without hesitation and it sat on my bookshelf waiting to be read again.
Shift forward to the present day, and Life of Pi was handed out to us in our book group. I took it with pleasure, glad of the opportunity to read the book again. Sadly, the second time around, I wasn’t nearly as impressed.
I don’t think it is because I take less pleasure in a book on a second reading. On the contrary, there are many books I can think of which get better and better every time you pick them up (I haven’t read Lord of the Rings 13 times by accident). I really had thought this would be one of those, but what we forget is that every book which has been read in the past is now part of our history and our memory, and in the intervening time we change. Sometimes those changes make no difference at all. Other times, the changes are huge. I don’t know what had changed, but I found the story a bit silly, unnecessarily violent in parts and although it was still compelling in the way I remember, I just didn’t warm to Pi on the second reading.
I often wondered how an author could make the story of a boy and a wild Bengal Tiger adrift on the ocean for months at all interesting. But he does, and you do have to keep turning the page to find out what happens next. Maybe the thrill at the imagination was what impressed me so much on the first reading. This time around, I was prepared for the imagination and so I spent more time with the characters – and found that I wasn’t a particular fan of the characters at all. I took to Richard Parker – but then which tiger lover wouldn’t. But I found Pi irritating, the narrator contrived, and the family which Pi lost a bit painful.
Nevertheless this is a story of survival in every sense. The overarching theme is one of adapting to the circumstances, no matter what the circumstances are. Whether he is deciding how to stay alive when he was a castaway with only a wild animal as his companion, or simply deciding what story to tell when people wanted to know how he survived after his rescue, Pi understands survival. In that respect he represents the animal side of humans, but still with very human traits.
The whole incident with the carnivorous island was almost too bizarre to be believed. Even knowing what was coming I found it odd in the extreme. I could buy the miniature zoo on the lifeboat. I could buy the orangutan on the bananas. I could almost buy the strange period of blindness and the weird meeting with a random human being in the middle of the ocean. But the meercats and the acidic algae did it for me.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a fantasy, and I have a vivid imagination. I think my problem with this book was that it didn’t quite know whether it was supposed to be a complete fantasy or a fiction based in the real world. It tried to straddle both, and I didn’t feel satisfied with either. Sadly, although my copy is still on my bookshelf, it will be a long while before I pick it up for a third time. And I will need to have changed as a person quite a lot by then.
Rating: 7/10
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 978-1841953922
Date: 2003
Date Finished: 31 January 2009
Pages: 348
