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Life of Pi
By Yann Martel

How odd that I would read this book before seeing the movie. I guess my film viewing habits really have fallen off the table.

A more germane topic, however, concerns all this book wishes to tell us about life, and faith, and maybe truth--though that last one is highly debatable.

Author Yann Martel covers a lot of philosophical ground in Life of Pi, his somewhat spectacular story of, succinctly, a boy and a tiger on a boat. I say “somewhat spectacular,” because Martel’s ultimate storytelling gambit--which story is the “real” story?--actually winds up undercutting the impact of the trick he’s trying to play. If there had been one twist at the end of the book--some ambiguity in one aspect of Pi’s amazing journey, some distinct item that would provide a sharper, clearer “Aha!” moment for the reader--that might have served everyone’s needs rather well. But laying the entirety of the adventure on the line? I call that a bit of overreach, an act of authorial hubris that has too much potential to leave readers feeling excessively manipulated and to undo whatever good work Martel hoped to achieve. (I also happen to think he bungled the ambiguity; there are elements of the supposedly metaphorical story which, within the narrative’s reality, should have been easily verifiable one way or another.)

For me personally, “Life of Pi” shows another problem arises that highlights why, at this stage of my life, I find it so difficult to read fiction. Martel liberally sprinkles an encyclopedia’s worth of obscure knowledge--mostly, in this case, zoological knowledge--throughout Pi’s first-person narrative. It is exactly the kind of brazen authorial showboating that ruins fiction for me. Nonfiction works must be well-researched and extensively referenced, or else the author’s authority withers and perishes; but fiction has different demands. Showy displays of the author’s research may be good for attracting critical attention and awards--”Oooh, such extensive research you did--here, have a shiny object...”--but a writer who flamboyantly exhibits his research inevitably takes this reader out of the story. Here I am, reading a story, and then the esoterica drops: suddenly, I’m not reading a book--I’m staring at a Everest-sized pile of index cards (or the digital equivalent thereof). It’s a lot like watching a movie and seeing a boom mike that was accidentally left within the upper corner of the camera’s view; instantly, the illusion is broken, and I start to wonder about the competence of the person who put this thing together.

On the other hand, Martel deserves high praise for his skill as a prose stylist. Thanks to my own writing and editing work, I’ve developed a constant need to assess the quality of any text I read--especially when I’m reading fiction. But with “Life of Pi” my stylistic alarm bells almost never rang out loud. Martel crafts excellent--almost lyrical--prose. Without question, his literary skill is consummate and expert. In that sense, “Life of Pi” is a breath of fresh air versus other recent works, so many of which have been published seemingly without benefit of compositional skill or professional editing. From a ‘words on the page’ point of view, “Life of Pi” is a joy to read.

So we find a very mixed bag when we consider “Life of Pi.” The book has so many devoted fans that I doubt any critique by me would have much impact on how others feel about it. I should probably recommend this book for reasons of cultural literacy alone. But I do wish the author had not been guilty of literary overreach. A gesture made presumably to teach was, in the end, too grandiose to effectively instill its lesson. Martel may have felt that he needed something epic to get through to modern readers, but a smaller, subtler effort was all we really needed. Perhaps it would have been better if, as a guy trying to make a statement about faith, Martel had had a little more faith in us.