All righty then. I’ve been meaning to post an update for a while, but I’m a bit lost when it comes to messing around with my templates (I’m a-skeered of code), so screw it. I had these big, beautiful plans for a whole separate section, but if we wait for me to figure that out we’ll be waiting until this book becomes part of that Five Foot Library Reader’s Digest used to put out. And now Julie has pretty much goaded me into getting started. So here we go.
For years I picked up this book and put it back on the shelf. I don’t know quite what kept me from reading it. I think I was a afraid it was going to be uppity CanLit, all anti-heros and oppressive themes. Or that the tiger would talk, a la the movie Beethoven. In the end, I chose it because the grade 8 and 9 Language Arts classes Mike was student teaching were reading it, so he read it. He’s not what you’d call an avid reader of literature, so for him to say he really liked it made me think it must have been worthwhile. It was!
The book tells the story of Pi Patel, a boy from Pondicherry in India. Pi (which is short for Piscine), is the kind of kid who likes to think about things. The first part of the book deals largely with how he remembers his childhood, and explores themes of religion and spirituality a-plenty. Pi is fascinated by Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism, and there’s a great scene that explores whether one can practice all three or follow only one. Pi’s parents are zookeepers, and he also spends a lot of his childhood learning about animal behavior.
The second part of the book follows Pi as he floats in a lifeboat for 227 days, his only companion a Bengal tiger. (I’m going to say right here that I think this is what made me avoid the book for a long time. It shouldn’t have put me off.) Pi, who only ever “wanted to know God”, begins to do things he never imagined he’d do, just in order to survive. Some of them, like eating meat, fly in the face of his beliefs.
I’m not going to spoil the plot (like Wikipedia! booo), but I will say that a shipwrecked main character has a lot of thinking to do. And even though there’s a lot of “boy vs tiger’, the book doesn’t get bogged down. Martel uses some fascinating devices to convey the sense of the empty days Pi experiences. Pi makes list after list – of his surroundings, of his behavior, of the things he sees and does. He also manages to create a set of beautifully rounded characters, whether they’re human, tiger, orangutan or hyena.
I think what I liked best about the novel is that it lends itself to a range of interpretations. I came away with a different set of ideas about it than Mike did, for example. When we talked about the book we both found we had opposite impressions of what happened in the end. We both had wildly differing ideas about whether the tiger was real at all, and what the book was trying to say.
I didn’t set out to tag these novels as good or bad, but I’m going to channel Siskel and Ebert for a second and give this one two thumbs up. It made me think, it was beautifully written, but it also entertained me. I devoured it, much the way a shipwrecked tiger might devour a giant fish.