Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

About a month or so ago, I finished reading Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. It won the Man Booker Prize and had a great tag-line on the inside cover: a story that “will make you believe in God.” Even though the book didn’t involve circles or apples, I felt I had to read it. :-)

It looks like I may end up being one of the few people in the world that didn’t love the book. Parts were entertaining and insightful, but other parts dragged the book down. Essentially, the book had three parts, first was the young boy (Pi) learning about different religions, followed by a discussion about zoos and animals, and last, a survival story of the Pi on a life raft on the ocean with a tiger. Tacked on at the end was the part that was supposed to make you believe in God.

The first part of the book was the young Pi’s journey into religious syncretism (I learned a new word!). As we’re introduced to Pi and a number of interesting secondary characters, Pi decides to be Hindu, Christian, and Muslim at the same time. Unfortunately, the “many paths to God” and “all religions are the same at the root” themes are barely discussed. Rather, any further exploration is put aside in favor of the old “a child is wiser than adults” theme, as Pi’s faith challenges his parents and priests from each religion.

I feel that Martel missed a huge opportunity here. His setting was very unique and engaging, exploring these religious themes in this context could have been amazing.

The next part of the book was a discussion about animals and zoos. Here the major theme was challenging the romantic view of nature: the idea that nature is an Eden-like state where animals have peaceful and happy lives. Most people instinctively feel bad when they see animals in a zoo, thinking that they would prefer to live in the wild. Like all things, this is arguable. After all, the wild is a pretty tough place: things are constantly trying to eat you while the things that you are trying to eat keep running away.

Martel presents a lot of good information here and this was probably my favorite part of the book. But the tone of this section came off as unnecessarily defensive and was distracting.

From here, we abandon the zoo and India, as Pi and his family take a boat to Canada with a handful of animals. The boat sinks and we’re left with Pi, a tiger, and a few other animals (zebra, hyena, and orangutan) on a lifeboat. This section is pretty interesting as the animals are clearly out of their element and it takes a while before only the tiger and Pi remain. The tiger, named Richard Parker, is very anthromorphized through the story.

Along the journey we get long descriptions of the Pi’s and the tiger movement on the lifeboat, but as we never got a clear description of the boat, it’s hard to understand how all this could be happening with a tiger on board. We also read about a hallucination where the boat comes across another castaway and later then an island of algae and meerkats. The latter is a straight-forward literary device indicating major psychological change, but most of the effect was lost since the island adventure was so nonsensical.

We also get a lot of details on how Pi survived on the boat: taming the tiger, catching fish, sharks, and turtles, and building a smaller raft for him to live on. We also learn how he reached a mutually beneficial arrangement with the tiger (Pi catches the food and feeds the tiger) which is similar to the relationship between a zookeeper and his animals.

Finally, Pi and the tiger get to Mexico and the tiger disappears into the forest. Pi is then interviewed by some insurance adjusters about the ship sinking. They express disbelief in his story and he tells them a much more realistic but disturbing parallel version of events that where the animals are replaced by other survivors from the ship. This version includes Pi’s mother’s murder and Pi murdering the cook.

Pi tells the insurance adjusters that since the “true truth” can’t be proven and both stories seem to fit the details, they should choose the story they prefer. By metaphor, the religious lesson is that we don’t believe in things because they are true, but because we choose to believe in what makes us happy. So why not opt for the more happy story, even if it’s not the more plausible.

It is interesting how the subconscious can push us to accept the happier story, but in this case, Pi is completely aware of both versions and consciously chooses the one over the other. As a result, the “religion is a better fiction” theme fails, because the story didn’t execute properly on it.

So ultimately I was a little disappointed by the book. It had some great themes and ideas, but failed to execute. The book was enjoyable and I’d recommend it to others, though I probably wouldn’t read it again.