Review of "Life of Pi" by Yann Martel.

"Life of Pi", which won the Mann-Booker Prize, is a survival story about an Indian boy, Pi, who has to share a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger after a shipwreck. The publisher’s blurb says that it is ".. a tale that will make you believe in God." Because Pi is very devout in an ecumenical way, praying to Jesus, Mohammed and Krishna indiscriminately, the book certainly makes a feature of religiosity and does some promo work for faith through the central character. However, I think that only those who are religiously inclined or committed already will find Pi’s religiosity inspiring. The rest of us will think of it merely as a character trait, no more compelling than if he believed in astrology or Santa Claus.

The book is quite readable as a record of endurance. Survival stories (famously 'Robinson Crusoe', but stretching back to 'The Tempest' and 'The Odyssey', and forward to 'Pincher Martin', 'Lord of the Flies' and films like 'Lifeboat' and 'Castaway') have an elemental appeal to our instinct for self-preservation. We probably pay attention to survival stories because of the chance that some day we may be the survivors of a ship- or plane- wreck and may need to devise similar strategies ourselves.

However, finding religious inspiration in a survival story is completely illogical when many perish for every one that survives. Pi survives and thanks the gods for his deliverance. But his parents and brother were drowned, along with hundreds of other passengers. Are we to conclude that the gods did not give a damn about them? The great love and compassion of the gods seems obvious to Pi, but a glance at the total drowned shows how irrational that conclusion is.

In his descriptions of the animals and the cramped, bleached world of the lifeboat, Martel achieves a high degree of realism. Pi is the son of a zoo manager and is given much knowledgable commentary on the behaviour and evolutionary history of animals. Sometimes the realism becomes gruesome. A hyena eviscerates a terrified goat while it is still alive and later decapitates an orang-utang in an orgy of blood. Killing and eating forms a regular motif of the book. There is even a gratuitous scene where Pi tries to eat the tiger's faeces. Such scenes are not for the squeamish and gave me the strong impression that Martel was acting the 'tough' writer, as if to say, 'I may be religious, but I am not soft.' But Martel does not seem to notice the contradiction between a compassionate, omnipotent god and a world of cruelty and pain. His book therefore seems shallow when compared to Blake's poem, "The Tyger."

Blake was very religious and so he found the combination of power, beauty, symmetry and ruthlessness in the tiger a challenge to his faith. His poem is full of questions, but they all centre round one: how could a kind and loving god create such a savage, terrifying animal? "What immortal hand or eye/Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?" Martel is untroubled by such doubts. One paragraph describes the tiger's ferocious savagery as a triumph of evolution and the next has Pi happily at his prayers. It is unlikely that a book will be thought-provoking when the author shows little sign of being thought-provoked himself.

There is a challenge for Humanists at the end of the book. In a sudden fit of modernist writing, Martel provides a short alternative version of the story, one in which the animals are reconfigured as other humans in the lifeboat. He then asks us which story we prefer and no doubt people will choose the story with animals. And that is what religious faith is like, he says. Humanists are people who choose the story without animals, just as they choose the world-view without gods. Humanists are therefore dessicated people with no imagination or sympathy.

Unfortunately for Martel, Humanists are people with imagination, sympathy and intelligence. They know that religious belief or non-belief is not a simple matter of choice, but is instead a matter of facing up to the facts and being consistent. It would be nice to survive death and live forever with one's loved ones, but all the evidence points in the opposite direction. It would be nice if a kindly spirit would protect us from ruthless people and terrible accidents, but in its absence humans will have to make their own rules and organise society as best they can. It would be nice if humans were a special breed favoured by the gods, but evolutionary science tells us that we are only one species among many on this overcrowded planet and the future of all lies in our hands.

This book did not shake my Humanist beliefs and make me think again about the gods, as it promised. But it did shake my belief in the Mann-Booker Prize as a guide to great literature.

Reviewed by Les Reid