Life of Pi

By Yann Martel
In the beginning I found this book irritating; a character announces sententiously that “this is a story that will make you believe in God”, and the main character, Pi (short for Piscene) is a little righteous in his unwavering belief in God and his dismissal of agnostics and atheists alike. My hackles went up, me being a card-carrying atheist and all.

Pi, who grows up in his father’s zoo in Pondicherry, India, is also righteous on the matter of zoos, and this also made me cranky. Sure, animals can be content in a well-managed zoo enclosure and zoos are important for preserving endangered species, in particular, but he seemed to have no concept that animals could be bored – food and shelter isn’t everything. Also, he assumes all animals are the same - Pi describes cases where zoo animals have had the opportunity to escape and haven’t budged, or have returned to their cages after a short experience of the wider world. I once left my mouse cage door open all night; out of 11 mice only two bothered to escape. Some animals are just bolder or more curious or more active, whereas their brothers and sisters might be more cautious or afraid.

Listen to me, the animal behaviour expert. Where was I? As a Hindu, Pi becomes interested in other religions in his early teens and ends up becoming a baptised Christian and a Muslim as well. This, unsurprisingly, appalls the local priest, pandit and imam when they all meet (by chance) in the town market and congratulate Pi’s parents on their son’s piety and then realise he has been worshipping “at the altar” (so to speak) of all three on a regular basis.

This made me quite fond of Pi. It was interesting to read Pi’s impressions of two other religions, when compared to the Hindu faith – how ridiculously fallible yet reassuringly human Jesus Christ seemed when compared with Hindu gods (I mean, he walks places! What God does that??); Islam’s physicality of worship and its connection with the earth (worship outside!). I have no idea whether Yann Martel is Hindu himself (he was born in Spain so it seems unlikely) so I don’t know how much we can believe in the authenticity of these perceptions, but Pi’s beliefs are engaging - in Gandhi’s words “All religions are true” and in Pi’s own, “I just want to love God”.

This all reminded me of the CS Lewis’ Narnia series, where in The Last Battle the “good” god Aslan reveals that if you do good things in the name of the “bad” god, Tash, you are really doing them for Aslan, and vice versa. In other words, it doesn’t matter who’s name you are worshipping or the manner in which you are worshipping, it is your actions that count in the end. The Narnia books are often held in deep suspicion as being sneakily religious, like they were the literary form of a Mormon doorknocker, but I can testify that in at least one case they helped make an atheist. How silly it seemed to me that a religion should declare that there is only one right way to worship! If there is a God, or gods, it seems pretty unfair to condemn the majority of humanity to hell (or wherever) merely for using the wrong name.

I seem to have got distracted again. Anyway, the book picked up for me from there – Pi’s family decides to move to Canada during the political upheavals of the 1970s and arrange to sell all their animals, many to zoos in North America. They board a cargo ship, with their animals, and set sail. The ship sinks, and Pi finds himself on a life raft with a wounded zebra, a hyena, an orang-utan and very large Royal Bengal tiger.

The zebra, hyena and orang-utan don’t last very long; it is only Pi’s knowledge of animal behaviour that allows him to set up an uneasy truce with the tiger. This part of the book is quite lovely, even though it portrays suffering – in particular, Pi’s descriptions of the sea life he observes. It actually made me want to be adrift in a lifeboat, which I know is silly. (Also I would love to be adrift with a tiger, even though that is really silly, because it would eat me).

So I came round to this book in the end. There were some interesting philosophical bits, some thoughts are provoked (obviously, looking back at my previous rants!) and a mean twist at the end. (I won’t give it away for those who haven’t read it). In the end Martel seems to want you to think about what you want to believe is true – Christian, Muslim, Hindu or atheist – rather than what there is proof for.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Fangland

By John Marks
It’s been a long time since I read any horror, because, you know, me and horror don’t get along so well, so I’m not sure if I’m correct here, but I think this book might, well, be sneaking over into the horror genre. There are no ice picks involved, or chainsaws or people being skinned or anything (not directly, anyway) and the book cover doesn’t make use of dripping blood; the horror it contains is more of an intellectual quality - the horror that has been inflicted on real persons throughout the centuries.

Interestingly, also, Fangland is a post-9/11 horror story; the horror that was nearly 3000 people’s last moments (plus all the associated shock and emotional damage that was the survivors’) is woven into the narrative. I’ve only read one other book that was quite so directly a post-9/11 novel, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close; and although I thought Foer’s book was excellent, I think Fangland was more effective at capturing what the events of that day did to the city of New York.

Fangland is a modern take on the vampire legend, and at the start I thought it was going to be a bit too clever for itself, but I ended up really quite liking it. I will look for other novels by John Marks. It is set (for a good part of the action) in the offices of a television current affairs program (The Hour) in downtown New York, located just next door to the holes that exist where the World Trade Centre used to stand. The rest of the story is set in Romania, as we follow what happens to one Evangeline Harker, who has been sent there by her bosses at The Hour to assess the possibility of a story on an Eastern European crime lord called Ion Torgu.

The story is told from the viewpoints of a number of different characters; for me it was Evangeline’s voice that read best, challenging my pet theory that it is difficult for men to write convincing female characters and vice versa. (I can’t really test the vice versa; male characters written by women often seem quite convincing to me, but what would I know? You blokes will have to confirm/deny). Not all of the book works for me and there are, to paraphrase the C&C Music Factory, a few bits that made me go “Hmmm” - such as the scene in which Evangeline uses her sexuality to fend off an attack by Torgu. To paraphrase the evil Mexicans in For a Fistful of Dollars, “ehhhh??” I suppose at least it wasn’t the same old “vampires are sooo sexy” thing that most authors peddle. But overall, the book was moving and chilling…if you feel in the mood for a vampire novel, definitely read this one over Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Dead Sleep (2006)

By Greg Iles
Another thriller – in this, our heroine, Jordan Glass, is a burnt-out photojournalist whose twin sister vanished over a year ago from her home in New Orleans and is thought to have been the victim of serial killer. While in Hong Kong, Jordan stumbles across an exhibition of paintings, all of nude women, who may be sleeping but look more like they may be dead. And – one is an exact portrait of Jordan’s sister! (And therefore also of Jordan). Jordan immediately contact the FBI agents investigating the disappearances in New Orleans with this new information, and the story goes from there.

This was quite a nifty book, plot wise – nicely written too, and the author has certainly done some research regarding painting and art authentication. However…the character of Jordan bugged me from the start. She’s a pretty hard-nosed character – she’s tough, she gets what she wants, has had to survive in a man’s world etc etc – and I wondered if I was suffering from some culturally inflicted misogynism that disapproves of a somewhat mannish woman. Or did I succumb to my prejudices regarding men who write from the female perspective? (I.e. It never quite works). Whichever, I felt Jordan didn’t ring true. It felt like Iles was trying a bit too hard to make her a post-feminism modern woman – and yet a woman of which men would approve. Tough, but non-threatening all round. I don’t know, I’m babbling now. But not a bad read – I’ll give Iles another go.

So, is it possible for a man to write convincingly from a woman’s perspective, and vice versa? People seem to get in trouble, for example, for writing from the perspective of a black underprivileged drag queen if they are in fact a straight, upper-class white chick, but nobody blinks twice at men writing as women and so on. Not that I think you should blink, I think anyone should be free to write in the character of whoever they like – just that your resulting book might not be terribly convincing to anyone who really is a black underprivileged drag queen. The trouble with my theory is that I can’t judge its validity from anyone else’s perspective – I can only really judge books portraying white middle-class women of a certain age, after all.

Rating: 7 out of 10

The Nanny Diaries (2004)

By Nicola Kraus & Emma McLaughlin
This book really wasn’t very good, but still somehow I kept reading. Nanny, our heroine, is employed by Mr and Mrs X, to look after their son Grayer. Mrs X, in particular, is so unbearably awful that you keep turning the pages in hopes that she will be socially humiliated, made to realise what an awful parent and worthless human being she is and then consequently die of shame.

Unfortunately this never happens. Nanny continues to work for the X’s, carrying out all of their unreasonable demands and never once fighting back. When she is sacked at the end of the novel she doesn’t even leave a few prawns hidden around the apartment for good measure. She does leave them a recorded message on the Nannycam they have installed in the apartment, but it wasn’t anywhere near as vitriolic as I would have liked.

I think what was most disturbing about this book, despite the authors’ protestations of fictional status, was that I am sure every incident in this book is based on fact, and that such shocking people really do exist. I just wanted to shake everybody – the X’s for obvious reasons, and Nanny for continuing to work for them.

Rating: 3 out of 10