Life of Pi

A novel Yann Martel

This work won the Booker Prize and deserved every bit of the award. From the beginning Yann Martel devises an interesting strategy for the book: he tells the story in the first person, from the perspective of Pi, but he interjects this narrative with descriptions of his personal encounters with Pi Patel, year after the events. This style shows us two different Pi Patels--past and present--and allows him to develop themes on two levels. And so while we know the outcome from the beginning of the book, the story is not compromised.

Pi's story on its own would be interesting enough--a boy survives a cargo shipwreck and makes the long journey to land in a lifeboat, alone except for the company of a Bengal tiger. But Martel makes it into something more than just another bleak tale of raw survival.

Pi is not an ordinary teenage boy, and Martel spends the first half of the book introducing his life in India before the accident. We learn about Pi's formative experiences with animals during his father's tenure as manager of the Pondicherry zoo. And more importantly, we learn about Pi's relationship with the divine. We follow his explorations of God in the Christian, Muslim, and Hindu faiths, and his Gandhian conclusions, that all religions speak true.

By spending the first part of the book in his formative years in India, Martel gives us a strong base for understanding Pi as he faces his hardships on the lifeboat, and why, as Martel says in the introduction, this is a story "that will make you believe in God."

Martel brings a fine balance to this story. He keeps it from becoming too grotesquely involved in the challenges of survival, but he does not spare us the truth. He gives Pi's faith and philosophical musings an important role, but he does not allow them to overwhelm the plot. Martel weaves Pi's actions and his thoughts as he goes through his trials into a seamless whole. So that while the story drew me in, I also found myself thinking about spiritual truth, the nature of belief, and the deeper relationships between man and animal and man and man. Not recently have I read a book that does this so well.