My views on Booker prize winning books are quite well documented. With a few notable exceptions, they are mostly homogenous, following similar narrative tracks and quite often a sentence structure that can charitably be described as derivative. Many of the recent ones have featured sub-continental locations and themes, and have been by South Asian authors, and as a result that derivation is quite often from the author of the ‘Booker of Bookers’, by way of a certain Mr Garcia Marquez. As a result, I am jallofied from doodh, and avoid like the plague anything that has its roots in magical realism with an Indian flavour, when it comes to my reading. Therefore, picking up “Life of Pi” was a mistake on my part.
This is a mistake that I made a few years ago, and am happy to report was one of the best ones of my life. Having had a couple of conversations about the book recently (and more on this later), I once again asked myself: How did Yann Martel take a premise which is laden with the promise of turgidity of Arundhatian proportions, and turn it into what I can only call an unqualified triumph, and also win the Booker on his way to it?
The answer to both lies not so much in the story itself, but in the manner of its telling. Prologues can be a tricky proposition, but there is one to start of this book that has to rank amongst the finest ever written, when it comes to setting the tone for a novel, and getting a reader’s attention. Once you have piqued the reader’s curiosity, and established one or more characters that the reader would be interested in knowing more about, that in itself is half the battle.
The second key is the believability. Strange as it may seem, somehow this story about the most improbable of things, a boy being cast away on a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with only a Bengal tiger for company along the way does not, at any point, seem so fantastical a thing that it must be fiction of the sort that tries to ground itself in the real world, and fails miserably. The style of the narrative is again at play – when a novel is written in the form of a journalist taking down an eyewitness account then, once you have accepted this as fact, the rest seems to just be a natural progression.
The third key, to me, is the pace of the narrative. Life of Pi is not a slender tome (although not in A Suitable Boy territory either), and yet the narrative canters along at a pace which does not give the reader much pause for wondering whether such phenomena actually exist in the natural world (most of them do, actually). Suspension of scepticism is key, and once achieved, your readers are then eating out of your hands much like a tame tiger would.
Perhaps most importantly, though, this is the story of the indestructibility of the human spirit, even under the most appalling of circumstances. Thanks to the prologue, the reader knows that all will be (a few psychological scars aside) well in the end. And when you marry that to a sledgehammer of a final act, the masterpiece is complete.
If you are going to take a risk with one award winning book this year, let it be this one. A word of warning, though: not all award winning books are this good (although some are pretty damn fantastic), so don’t go out and blow your entire personal extravagances budget for the month on other winners. Pick and choose, and you may find another star amongst all the derivative rubbish.
Postscript:
I have recently heard some worrying news: a movie adaptation is being done of the book. The worry is on two fronts. Firstly, I am yet to see a movie adaptation of a book that is as good as the original volume. Even movies which are great on a standalone basis (Jaws and The Godfather come to mind) have books which had a depth that could not be matched. It would seem, therefore, that a movie would need to be in the ‘all time great’ category to come close to the written word version.
Furthermore, there are some books which, when you read them, you think must be unfilmable, and Life of Pi falls in that latter category, to my mind. After all, how on Earth do to make a film about a teenage boy cast away on a lifeboat with nothing but a Bengal Tiger for company? Having Ang Lee direct would help, in theory. He may have an inconsistent track record at delivering box office, but he does manage to tell a story well, and remain faithful to the spirit of the original. So I YouTubed the trailer with some significant trepidation, expecting that kid from “Slumdog Millionaire”, improbable special effects, and some dubious liberties taken with the content.
So far, so good. If the trailer is the only thing to go by (which it is, for me) at least I am not tearing my hair out quite yet. There is still a long distance to traverse in terms of expectations of quality, but on the basis of the available information, I am willing to let it slide so far. Only time will tell whether it can approach the peaks of The Godfather, or is destined for the scrapheap a la What To Expect When You Are Expecting...
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