Beatrice and Virgil - Yann Martel

You know when you read a novel by Yann Martel you’re going to experience the story in a variety of ways.

There’s the story on the page, the story off the page, and your own intellectual and emotional responses to the experience.

As it was with Life of Pi, so it is with Beatrice and Virgil, a complex, fascinating and at times disturbing novel. Like its Booker-winning predecessor, Martel’s latest novel explores the nature and power of narrative.

Beatrice and Virgil is the story of a famous, award-winning writer, whose attempts to write an allegory about the Holocaust – accompanied by a non-fiction essay on the same topic – are rejected by his publisher. Angry and frustrated, he turns his back on writing, until a mysterious package leads him to a taxidermist.

The taxidermist is struggling to finish a play he’s been writing, featuring a donkey and a howler monkey called Beatrice and Virgil (named after characters in Dante’s Divine Comedy).

Henry is initially fascinated more by the gruff old man and his collection of meticulously mounted animals than he his with the play. But he’s slowly drawn into the strange piece of drama, especially when he suspects the play has the same intention as his failed novel.

Martel has said in recent interviews that he spent years writing Beatrice and Virgil, starting out wanting to write a play, a novel, and a flip book (with the “flip” side being a non-fiction essay). As it turns out, he’s managed to combine all three.

While not a flip book, there are elements of essay in the story, as Henry grapples with his own failings to combine fiction and non-fiction in a single tome, and muses on the dearth of fiction on the Holocaust (quietly establishing the basis for Martel’s own novel).

There are also numerous scenes from the taxidermist's play (provided out of chronological order) that become increasingly disturbing. The play itself initially feels like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, until the reality of Beatrice and Virgil’s situation is fully revealed.

Henry’s reaction to their suffering is compounded by the fact he sees the “real” Beatrice and Virgil among the mounted animals in the taxidermist’s workshop.

There are layers of ideas here. Martel explores the concept of “real” and “true”, the nature of life and death, and offers a parallel between the taxidermist and a novelist: both require respect for the subjects, both make choices that impact perception, and both must have an eye to detail to remain faithful to “truth”.

Martel challenges readers in ways we don’t always recognise until later. In Life of Pi, the scene with the flesh-eating island challenged our ability to suspend disbelief. Here he challenges our perception of the Holocaust – on an emotional level.

Through a series of surprising and shocking scenes (in the taxidermist’s play and Henry’s own life), it feels like Martel is asking: Do you understand? Do you really understand?

Like Life of Pi, Beatrice and Virgil is a story that stayed with me long after I finished it. Not just because of the unique combination of narrative techniques, or the intriguing plot, or even the suspense that slowly builds … but because of how I felt when I read those final chapters.

Life of Pi explained

Life of Pi explained

Life of Pi by Yann Martel is one of the most analysed, discussed and debated books of recent years, not just because of its plot, but because it makes the reader question what they have read and what they believe.

The Booker Prize winner author was one of the major draw cards at last weekend’s Brisbane Writer’s Festival, and he didn’t disappoint. He spoke about his motivation for writing Life of Pi, and how researching the story changed his life along the way.

In this post, I’m going to share a few of the things he spoke about. Those who haven’t read Life of Pi – and intend to – may want to look away now. Don’t spoil the experience of discovering the book’s talking points for yourself.

Life of Pi provides the kind of literary experience fans tend hold close to their hearts. Yann understands that, and opened his talk by promising to try and do “the least damage” to individual interpretation of the story. Because the interpretation of this story is everything.

The tale begins with Pi, the son of a zookeeper in India, who becomes curious about religion and simultaneously practices Hinduism, Islam and Christianity, much to the consternation of his respective religious teachers.

Pi’s religious instruction is interrupted when his family decides to relocate – along with a large menagerie of animals – to Canada. Tragically, the ship sinks during a storm.

What follows is a fascinating, perplexing and occasionally disturbing story of survival.

When Pi finally washes up on the shores of Mexico 227 days later, he recounts two versions of his story. The same facts are offered, with a different interpretation.

In the first, Pi is the sole human survivor on a life boat with a zebra, hyena, orangutan and a huge Bengal tiger called Mr Parker. The second has no animals and is far more brutal. One requires suspension of disbelief, the other is “reasonable”.

Yann said the very structure of the story itself is designed to force the reader to subconsciously choose whether they are prepared to walk away from the “reasonable” to accept the better story. In other words to have faith, when to do so makes no sense.

The background to how the novel came about is interesting in itself, but this post is more concerned with the story what makes it such an original piece of narrative fiction.

The key for Yann was the question posed by Pi at the end of the book to the Japanese shipwreck investigators: which is the better story? For the author, this is the question at the heart of choosing a life of faith.

While researching Life of Pi, Yann – who describes himself as being “secular” before writing the book – read a lot of scripture and books about scriptures. In doing so, he started to ask himself “what would it be like to have faith?”

To find the answer, he put aside the aspects of religion that repel him and went to India’s diverse holy places “pretending” to have faith. He candidly admits that once inside that space, he didn’t want to leave.

Up to that point, Yann says he’d always considered himself a “reasonable” person. “When you’re reasonable, you have to make sense of everything.”

But he said being reasonable didn’t leave a lot of room for religion. “And when religion is ignored, art suffers. Society doesn’t dream when it is being uber reasonable.”

Life of Pi was his personal protest to stop making sense. To believe in a reality beyond the chemical.
One of the great moments of the session on the weekend was Yann’s explanation of the purpose of “the island”, one of the more obtuse plot developments in modern literature.

He said it served the sole purpose of making the “animal” version of the story harder and harder to believe. Even more so than the chance of a blind boy and blind tiger, coming across another blind shipwreck survivor, it’s at the point of the island that disbelief breaks down and the reader wants rationality kicks in.

“Many readers assume it is something deeply symbolic they just don’t get, or it’s an hallucination –they need a reason to prop up the fiction.”

But in his own words “religion goes beyond the confines of the reasonable”.

The second story – the one without animals and strange flesh-eating islands – involves no faith. “It’s all about man’s inhumanity to man. That’s not the reality I want. I want to go back to the first story and choose to believe.”

For him, life is a matter of subjective interpretation of objective reality. Ultimately, Yann presents a very post modernistic perspective (all stories have equal validity – there is no ultimate truth, only what you believe).

Having said that, the author admits that after looking at all major religions, he’s become “pretty comfortable with Jesus”, although it’s safe to say he is not a member of any organised religion.

Regardless of whether you share his views on religion or philosophy, there’s no denying Life of Pi is an amazing use of narrative structure to encourage readers to think beyond the story – to even question what they believe and why.

Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil: my review