It was
my younger brother who gave me this book and
told me to read it. He said it was about the only two survivors
of a shipwreck crossing the Pacific Ocean in a lifeboat. One was a boy named Pi and the other, named
Richard Parker, was a Bengal tiger.
I liked
that idea, but I still wasn’t inclined to read the book, because I thought
that, otherwise, it sounded preachy. ‘This story will make you believe in God,’
it declares. I didn’t think so. If God Himself door-stepped me, He’d have a
tough time persuading me to believe in Him.
I’d tell Him, ‘You’re a figment, Mate.”
But I
ran out of books to read, and every print-addict knows how it is. I’ll read anything when withdrawal bites,
even the Daily Mail. Even Accountancy
Monthly. And there was LIFE OF PI on
my bookshelf. So I read it. And in future I’ll listen when my brother
recommends a book. (I did. He told me to read Mo Hayder’s TOKYO, so I
did, and, well, wow!)
But,
LIFE OF PI. A wonderful book. So much is packed into it, that no short
review could do it justice. Briefly: the
main part of the book is narrated by Pi as a middle-aged man, settled in
Canada. He is a lifelong vegetarian,
gentle-natured and devout, born and raised a Hindu, but also honouring God
through Islam and Christianity. All
these religions, he has come to understand, are, at their heart, the same. They are all about Love.
Pi was
born in Pondicherry, India, where his family kept a zoo; but when Pi was a
teenager, his parents emigrated to Canada.
Many of their animals were sold to American and Canadian zoos, and
transported on the same cargo ship that carried Pi’s family.
The ship
sank. Pi found himself adrift in a small
life-boat with: a zebra with a broken leg, a hyena, a female orang-utan, and
Richard Parker, a tiger named after the hunter who captured him as a cub. The tiger, sedated for the journey, at first
lay sleepily under the tarpaulin which partly covered the boat. It was the crazed hyena which was to be
feared, as it first attacked the wounded zebra, eating it alive; and then the
orang, killing her. The hyena was
terrifying, but when the tiger woke, it was outclassed. Richard Parker killed and ate the hyena.
How did
Pi outwit the tiger? He was lucky, he
admits, in that the tiger was used to captivity, and was an omega, a
subordinate animal. Pi used everything
he’d learned about animal behaviour: marking his part of the boat as his
territory by using his own urine and vomit, and intimidating the tiger by staring and blowing blasts on a
whistle. To help keep the tiger docile,
he fed it as well he could on fish and turtles, and provided fresh water from
the life-boats de-salination kits.
Still, he could never let down his guard. Richard Parker might have been a zoo-animal,
but he was not tame. Pi knew that one swipe from the tiger’s paw
could kill him.
All this
is completely gripping – and more than merely exciting. It’s beautiful, and awe-inspiring. The descriptions evoke the tininess of the
boat and the vast depth of water beneath it; the vast emptiness of sea and sky
around it. Pi looks down through depths
and depths of water, at ‘streets’ and ‘towns’ of fish. He describes the terror of a storm, where the
waves rise like mountains above the tiny craft, and lightening illuminates the
depths below him. Frankly, it was so evocative, it gave this
land-lubber the willies.
We feel
the immense power and physical bulk of the animals too – the frenzy of the
hyena, barely contained in the tiny craft. The appalling strength and grace of the tiger, as it leaps on top of the
tarpaulin to attack Pi – which it does, when he goads it, while training it to
respect his territory. (I won’t spoil
the story by telling you how he survives these attacks.) Even when Richard Parker lies in the boat’s
prow, at ease, basking in the sun, we are aware of great strength and ferocity at
ease. Pi can survive only so long as he
convinces Richard Parker that, on board their tiny floating zoo, Pi is the
alpha male.
But
Richard Parker was only doing what tigers do; just as the hyena was only being
a hyena. Even when one animal is eating
another alive, it isn’t evil. It is only
doing what its – God-given? – nature compels it to do. In fact, it’s impossible to imagine a tiger
or hyena thinking: although I am starving, I will not eat this wounded fellow
creature because it would be morally wrong.
The boat
eventually drifts to shore in Mexico. By
that time, both Pi and Richard Parker are weak and exhausted, but Richard
Parker leaves the boat immediately, and vanishes into the Mexican jungle. Pi is rather upset that the tiger doesn’t
give him so much as a glance. Much as he
feared it, he also valued its companionship, and without the spur of its
terrifying presence, he thinks he might have given up in despair.
Pi is
found, and taken to a hospital, where he recovers. At this point his narration ends. The writer to whom he’s been telling his
story researches it, and discovers that, while Pi was in hospital, he was visited
by executives from the Japanese shipping company who owned the sunken
ship. The writer obtains a transcript of
their conversation with Pi from the company records.
In it, the executives tell Pi
that they don’t believe his story. They
don’t believe he could have survived so long with a tiger as a shipmate, and no
tiger has been sighted in Mexico. How could
a tiger vanish without trace?
Pi asks
why they expect to find a tiger in a jungle: and he quotes stories of wild
animals which have survived, unseen, in modern cities for decades. Still the executives don’t believe him, and
eventually Pi tells another version of his story – which I won’t relate here,
because I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone who hasn’t yet read it. Suffice to say that the second story is
broadly recognisable as an account of the same events, but is even more brutal
and horrifying than Pi’s original tale; and, sadly, more believable. It makes the reader reconsider the whole
book; and drastically reconsider the character of the sweet, mild, gentle
vegetarian Pi who worships Love. And, come to that, it makes us reconsider our
own characters.
Pi asks
his interviewers which story they preferred: the one with the tiger or the one
without? They both prefer the one with
the tiger – even though they don’t believe it.
Probably every reader prefers the story of Pi and Richard Parker to the
alternative, even though the alternative is much closer to ‘real life’ as we
know it to be. Tigers and hyenas are, by
nature, brutal – but they don’t, as men do, make the choice to be.
But did
this story make me believe in God? No;
not even close.
In fact, having read the book, I think its declaration, 'This book will make you believe in God,' is ironic. Its underlying message, as I understand it, is exactly what I have believed about religion for
decades: that religions are the stories we tell each other and ourselves to
make the harshness of reality bearable.
We prefer the stories, we call them ‘true’, even when we know they’re
not, because the truth is as ugly and brutal as a hyena tearing and eating a
living zebra.
Pi, it seems, somewhere in his mind, knows the truth about
what happened on the boat: he knows whether or not there was truly a tiger and
a hyena – but even while he knows it, he refuses to know it. And the Japanese executives, even while
declaring his first story to be unbelievable, and his second story all too
possible and believable, also instantly declare that they prefer the
unbelievable story.
Story-telling, the book seems to say – fictions about
ourselves, fictions about Gods – are all that gives us hope, all that makes
life bearable. If we make ourselves
blind and deaf to everything except our stories, we can even convince ourselves
that Love is at the centre of existence.
But if we stop telling stories and look at reality – well,
perhaps LIFE OF PI holds a metaphor for that.
(We can’t even look at reality without telling stories.) A tiny, frail craft, precariously afloat on a
vastly deep, vastly wide and stormy ocean, with predators even within the craft
itself, and no respite from the vigilance against them.
LIFE OF PI is a superb book – lively, entertaining, witty,
intelligent and beautifully written.
I’ve read it twice now, and I imagine I shall read it many more times. But I find it puzzling that so many people think
it ‘uplifting’. Though it is often
playful, funny, and poetic, this is the pretty spray and foam on the ocean’s
surface. Beneath there are dark, cold
depths.
Perhaps a believer who shares one of Pi’s faiths – Hinduism,
Islam or Christianity – might end the novel with a different view. But, as an atheist, though I greatly admire
the book, I find its message beautifully bleak, and I’m as unbelieving as ever.
Life of Pi at Amazon UK
Amazon US
Amazon Ca
No comments:
Post a Comment