Leap of faith

For writer Yann Martel, art is a way of imposing order on the randomness of life

70-yann-martel Photo by Sanjay Ahlawat

In Canadian writer Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi, about a boy stuck in a lifeboat with a tiger for 227 days, he chose the number 227 for a reason. Because it is a prime number. "In my thinking, since Pi tells two stories, I did not want those stories to be divisible," says Martel. "You either believe the story with animals. Or you believe it without animals."

He is referring to the ending of the book. When Pi reaches the shore safely and narrates to a few officials his days at sea with the tiger, his story is met with disbelief. Surely what he says is too fantastic to be real. So Pi imbues it with the "dry, yeastless factuality they are looking for".

"You want a story that won’t surprise you," Pi tells them. "That will confirm what you already know. That won’t make you see higher or further or differently."

The tiger in the story, named Richard Parker, is an allegory for the divine. He is not what is keeping Pi from living. Rather, he is what keeps him alive. "If he died," says Pi, "I would be left alone with despair, a foe even more formidable than a tiger. If I still had the will to live, it was thanks to Richard Parker."

In a way, it is India that gave Martel the two great muses of his life—animals and gods. He discovered them when he came here in 1996 as a penniless hitchhiker. Hailing from a temperate, secular country like Canada, India was a dazzling revelation to Martel. "There is something about India that I connected with," he says. "I was drying up when I came here, and India nourished me with its monsoon rains." For Martel, a student of philosophy, India was a philosophically engaging country. "I came here and I had endless questions to myself," he says. "About what it means to be human."

One day, he was atop a hill in Matheran, Maharashtra, feeling "screwed" as the writer of two failed books, when the idea for Life of Pi struck him. The animal was going to be a metaphor for the divine, and the journey across the Pacific in a lifeboat, as he described it elsewhere, "an odyssey of the soul across existence". Life of Pi was published in 2001 and sold more than 10 million copies. It was adapted into a movie in 2012, for which director Ang Lee won the Academy Award.

However, this whimsical treatment of subjects—layering them with hidden meanings, often thinly disguised—has not always worked well for Martel. His much-awaited novel after Life of Pi, Beatrice and Virgil, an imaginative retelling of the Holocaust by two anthropomorphised animals, was panned by the critics. "What is one to say. Perhaps, to be kind, that Martel, not Jewish himself incidentally, is just not very bright," said one critic. They felt that a subject like the Holocaust was not to be treated lightly.

Martel vehemently disagrees. "Do we lose something when we do not accept certain narrative categories like Holocaust jokes, Holocaust science fiction, Holocaust westerns and masala Holocaust?" he asks. "Yes, because if we do not play with it, not in a trivial sense, but exercise our mental gymnastics, we lose perspective. Fiction tends to have broader wings than non-fiction. Stories sail through time in a way that history does not."

For someone whose books hum with mysticism, he is terribly methodical. He has written around 600 pages of notes for his latest book. He prints the notes and cuts them up. Some might be as short as a word. (While writing Life of Pi, one note had the word 'bamboozle' on it because it was commonly heard in India but not in Canada.) Then he puts them in envelopes, labels them and lays them out on the floor. That is his way of visualising the story. Eventually, when it is time to write, he opens the first envelope and "embarks on the thrilling journey of writing a novel".

Martel is a fluent speaker. His mind and thoughts are well-ordered. Which is interesting, because he says he is a very fidgety person. In fact, he writes while walking on a treadmill in a studio adjacent to his home in Saskatoon, Canada. "It is a tiny studio," he says. "Ten feet by 12, strictly devoted to works of my imagination." He lives with his partner Alice Kuipers, who is also a writer, and their four children, all under the age of 10.

He also loves experimenting with form. The book he is currently writing is on the Trojan War and is going to be expressed visually in two voices. The top half of some pages will be fragments from antiquity discovered by a scholar. The bottom half of those pages will be left empty, barring the odd footnote. On the other pages, there will be nothing on top while on the bottom, will be commentary on the fragments by the scholar. Martel intends the book to be a dialogue between antiquity and modernity. A combination of the fiction of the fragments and the non-fiction of the scholar, who, of course, is fictional.

He chose the Trojan War as a subject because it is the foundational myth of the Greek. They would not be who they are without the Iliad and the Odyssey. They are the very first books of the west and works of fiction. Much like his prose, he puts it in a way that is artistically beautiful and philosophically profound. "Before we are, we dream."