Life of Pi is that rare beast, a post-modernist novel of ideas that is also a wonderful adventure story. In this 2002 Booker prize winning novel Mantel plays with ideas about narrative and the nature of the novel while at the same time keeping the reader fully engaged with an exciting tale of a young man trapped on a lifeboat with only a tiger for company, adrift on the Indian Ocean for over 200 days.
I am guessing you knew that already – the central concept of the novel would once have been a surprising plot twist about a third of the way through, but now the cover illustration, the blurb on the back of the book, and of course the successful film of the novel all means that most readers will know this already. Post-modern might be a label that puts some readers off, but certainly here it shouldn’t. Mantel experiments with form and content within some quite traditional boundaries. This is a novel about an epic journey that stays firmly within the traditions of the genre, a quest for survival where the tension between two antagonists keeps the book in balance. In many ways the novel therefore owes a debt to survival novels going back as far as Robinson Crusoe.
Mantel uses a framing device to open the novel, in which ‘the author’ explains how he exiled himself in India to write a novel about Portugal just before the second world war, and is side-tracked by a meeting with the character who goes on to narrate much of Life of Pi, Piscine Molitor Patel, named after a French swimming pool of all things. Pi grew up quite reasonably resenting his unusual name, and adopts the abbreviated form to avoid the inevitable mockery. He is raised as a Hindu but as a teenager also becomes a Christian and a Muslim, seeing no contradiction in following all three faiths. He is brought up in the family-owned zoo in Pondicherry, once part of a small French territory in coastal India. Seeing political and social problems ahead in India, his father decides to sell the zoo and emigrate to Canada.
Pi is an endearing narrator who tells his story in a very straightforward and engaging way. The chapters in which Pi tells his account of his upbringing are interspersed by descriptions of the author’s interviews with the older Pi, giving glimpses of his settled life in Canada, a world apart from the drama of his youth. Hints are given of what is to follow after what is a fairly happy, prosperous and trauma-free childhood. This reference frame does of course tell the reader that Pi survives being ship-wrecked, which means our interest is engaged in wondering not whether but how he survives. Pi is brought up around the animals of his father’s zoo, and is a quick and resourceful learner, key knowledge and skills that help him survive when the time comes.
The second section of the novel begins with the fateful journey to Canada on a freighter which is also carrying many of the animals from their zoo being sold to other zoos in north America. The ship sinks suddenly in a storm, and Pi escapes in a lifeboat along with some of the animals from their crates – a hyena, a zebra, and an orangutan. This is never going to end well, and inevitably the hyena kills the zebra and the orangutan. The hyena’s dominance doesn’t last long either, because from under the boat’s tarpaulin emerges another surprising survivor, ‘Richard Parker’, the zoo’s strangely named Bengal tiger. Richard Parker quickly dispatches the hyena, leaving him alone with Pi on the open and lonely seas.
How is Pi going to survive sharing a small life-boat with a tiger? Surprisingly easily, all things considered. He builds a small raft using oars and life jackets and ties it to the bow of the boat. He sneaks back to the lifeboat periodically to raid its plentiful stores (echoes there of how Crusoe uses the stores and equipment on his shipwrecked ship) and fishes for food, sharing the majority of it with Richard Parker. He has water filtration devices and rain catchers, flares, tinned water and food – even a survival guide. But he quickly realises that keeping a distance from Richard Parker will not be enough – sooner or later he will get peckish and take the short leap to the raft. So he decides to train the tiger as if he was back in the zoo, teaching him to be submissive, using food as a reward, seasickness as punishment, and a whistle for dominance. This seems to work, and Pi and Richard Parker settle down into a unique and bizarre arrangement where the sole aim is survival.
The novel maintains a strong sense of realism throughout these chapters. There is a focus on the messy practicalities of survival – some of the descriptions of butchering fish and turtles are hard to stomach. But the realism begins to ebb away at the end of this section of the novel. Pi encounters another blind castaway, who tries to kill him but doesn’t get past Richard Parker. Later, they find land, but it is a floating island inhabited by thousands of meerkats. This is a refuge of sorts, but any plans to remain on this island long term are abandoned when Pi discovers its secret – by night it becomes carnivorous, and the meerkats only survive by hiding in the trees. The end of the adventure comes suddenly and without fanfare. The lifeboat washes onto a Mexican beach and Richard Parker disappears into the jungle, leaving Pi to recover with the help of some bemused locals.
The third part of the novel is a form of epilogue. Officials from the Japanese Ministry of Transport interview Pi as part of their investigation into the shipwreck. They query the veracity of his story. so he offers them an alternative account in which he is the animals on the lifeboat are replaced with the ship’s cook, a sailor with a broken leg, and his mother. The suggestion is that the principal story has been an allegory for this ‘real’ version of events, which Pi has invented to protect himself from accusations or the psychological burden of cannibalism and murder. This ending, in which the story we have just been told is thrown into doubt by an alternative account, reminded me of the ending of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, where the central story turns out to be fictitious, as if any parts of the novel had a stronger claim on reality than any other. As a device this effectively reminds the reader this is ‘just’ a story, and we choose which to believe. Pi explicitly calls out this choice, and suggests the same principle applies to religion – “And so it goes with God.”
This makes it sound as if Life of Pi is a pious book, but that wasn’t my reading of it. Neither the bizarre carnivorous island nor the “was it all a lie?” ending spoiled the integrity of the central narrative, which was a sustained feat of imaginative story-telling. Pi is a really enjoyable novel which pulls off the challenge of making the long castaway voyage of a teenage boy and a tiger seem believable, while at the same time having something interesting to say about narrative and religion. Recommended.
The Reading Bug 