I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the
Life of Pi by Yann Martel is a literary disaster. No, I know it has sold a lot of books and received more than its lion share of praise and hype, but that is not going to detract me from stating quite certainly that I did not enjoy this book as much as the publicity behind it suggested. Now that''s not to say there weren''t some enjoyable morsels peppered throughout, but these were few and
far between.
The premise of the story sounds quite promising: a young
castaway on a boat adrift in the ocean sharing the ordeal with a Bengal
tiger. Indeed, the first 90
pages or so that lead up to that fateful night when the protagonist Pi Patel suddenly finds himself bobbing around in a 26 foot
lifeboat, are actually quite enriching and endearing. The author Yann Martel''s recollection of a zoo in Pondicherry in the 1970s, however, is filled with excessive nuggets of zoology to mask his lack of substantial time in India, which is not a huge deal in of itself but it tells you a bit about his take on life there and his surface treatment of three religions that collide and coalesce and coexist in that country.
Submerged within the marketing of the book is a subtle challenge to atheists and agnostics: it will make you believe in God. Not that I needed convincing, but if I had been a member of one of the two aforementioned faithless groups, this book would have led me no closer to God. I congratulate the attempt at least, but frankly, the book is not about God at all, or religion for that matter, even though the author may have intended it that way. Casual offhand references to various traditions of Islam, Hinduism and Christianity do not convince anyone of anything. They are token efforts. Slipping in the fact that Pi liked to invoke in prayer the names of deities doesn''t help either.
The retelling of what would have been a dramatic sinking is blandly anti-climactic at best. Once Pi drifts off out into the ocean on his lifeboat, and the animals that initially populate the boat are exterminated, the story sputters and stalls right there out in the ocean alongside the lifeboat. What must have started out as a good idea for Martel ends up deflating right before our eyes. It is easy to see where he lost interest with the story while he was writing it, floating toward the end with nothing interesting more to say, impoverished with nothing but clichés, opinions, baby talk. We are left again with litanies of meaningless drivel detailing manifestations of the trivial and banal, with some nautical jargon thrown in. Pedantic and dry, it leaves no room for connection with the seeker behind the reader.
Martel''s attempt doesn''t even try to reach out nor does it even venture far into exploring the central spiritual issues that an incident like this could possibly engender and entail. Instead he has his hero blithering on about missing his family which can be taken as a given and need not be repeated. Indeed, Martel is into repeating elements in order to pad his word count...how many times can an author get away with describing the sky or the
sea or the regal magnificence of the tiger Richard Parker?
You have to be careful when you compare your story to a classic. In this case, Martel chooses to include a reader''s guide at the back of the book that subtly mentions his story in the same breath as Hemingway''s Old Man and the Sea. This is not the Old Man and the Sea – far from it. Nor is it in the same exalted league as Robinson Crusoe, another classic that the author namedrops in his story.
In addition to the audacity of the reader''s guide and its silly grade school reading comprehension questions, Martel chooses to include an author''s note that only adds to the self-righwhole project. The author''s note does nothing but confuse and delude the reader into thinking that Martel''s account could very well have happened. Whether there are elements of truth in the story or not, it would have been more effective to recount it in third person since it always feels like the author, so far removed from Pi, is trying his best to write in first person. The reader is left unconvinced of the authenticity in Pi''s voice since Martel never bothers to delve deep into the head and soul of Pi and really squeeze out some tragically beautiful ruminations on the human condition. No, Yann Martel chooses to take the easy way out, leaving the reader with a colossal cop-out in the end, casting doubt upon either version of the castaway''s tale that he offers. (Martel has Pi offer up a far more grisly alternative account on the high seas to representatives of the Japanese company that owned the ship that sunk, and he takes only eight pages to do it, leaving the reader to wonder whether the 319 pages they just finished reading couldn''t have been squished down into eight, preventing a disappointment that must have been a good idea at the time).
More reviews about the LIFE OF PI...A Colossal Disappointment