The first time I read this book was on a plane over twenty years ago. It was one of the first 'grown up' books that I ever read and it has honestly stayed with me ever since. Central character is Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, a young boy from Pondicherry in India. He grows up in a zoo, decides to join three different religions and changes his name from Piscine to Pi when the former becomes subjected to ridicule. But as political circumstances shift, Pi's parents decide to sell the zoo and move to Canada. Sustaining a shipwreck however, Pi finds himself adrift and alone in the midst of the Pacific Ocean. Alone that is apart from one important character. A tiger. A fully grown adult Bengal tiger called Richard Parker.

The thing about Life of Pi is that you can read it on a lot of different levels. You read it once, you finish it, you go back and you read it again. But while 'twist-at-the-end' books are a dime a dozen, that is not what is going on here. We travel with Pi on his lifeboat for the entire novel, we have glimpsed him at the beginning of the novel as a mature adult living in Canada. We think we know him. But at the novel's close, we witness the Japanese investigators' interview with the teenaged Pi immediately after his rescue and we are invited to challenge the whole story. Caught along with the momentum of the story, we have believed every word. Until now.

So on the one level, this is an adventure story about a boy trying to stay a step ahead of a tiger and not get eaten. There are chapters on his various survival strategies; how he gets fresh water, how he fishes, how he dodges the sharks, how he manages to not be eaten by the tiger. Being honest, I think that a lot of people who watched the film came away with this as their main impression. At the time of the film's release, I was teaching a class of ten and eleven year olds. A few weeks later, I saw one of my eleven year olds trying to read the book. Despite my usual attitude of all reading is good reading, I was concerned. But he had seen all the film and he liked tigers so as far as he and his family was concerned, what was the problem?

Life of Pi is a kind of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story because there are so many responses to the novel. Some people look at it and see a philosophical novel about religion and the nature of belief. Others see it as a powerful story of Pi's will to live. For me, it is about the importance of story-telling to humanity's survival. [spoiler]At the end of the novel, Pi hints to the Japanese investigators that he has witnesses terrible, shocking, harrowing events. The type of events that nobody would wish to remember. Instead he has spun a different featuring similar characters which he finds more palatable and it is this which he has chosen to believe.[/spoiler]I thought of Life of Pi again when I read Girl A recently. If the truth is too painful, is it acceptable to spin yourself a protective story? Is it in fact the best course of action?

I look back on my teenaged impressions of this book and the past really is another country. Back then I was close in age to the teenage Pi whereas now I am closer to the adult living in Canada. Pi is about making a choice to find happiness. Strangely, it reminds me of an extremely dear family friend who I knew growing up. Her mother died when she was very young due to the actions of a drunk surgeon. She and her younger sister spent years being cared for by relatives who made it clear that they were unwelcome. Finally their father wrote and told them to come and meet their 'new mother'. In later life, she married and her first baby died. Her husband was a remote figure. One of her other children died prematurely. Her life was hard. I know from reading her poetry that she struggled. But she made a conscious choice to find happiness among the hardship. I know her Quaker faith was a great support to her in doing this. I am not sure what she would have thought of this book but I do wonder if Yann Martell strikes at a similar truth to the one at her core; that the ability to find the positive is in itself a extraordinary gift to aid survival.

But high above all these musings and wonderings, Martell is a witty and thoughtful writer. In the novel, the tiger is named Richard Parker due to an administrative error which transposed the name of the hunter who captured him as a cub with the name given to the animal. The error amuses Pi's father and he chooses to let it stand. But there is more behind this. Richard Parker is the name of a character in Edgar Allen Poe's 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. He is a mutineer who is later cannibalised. Later in 1884, four yachtsmen were shipwrecked in a dinghy and after several weeks adrift, the cabin boy Richard Parker was cannibalised. Another Richard Parker was drowned during the sinking of Francis Spaight in 1846, an event which ultimately led to the cannibalising of another cabin boy. Martel felt that so many shipwrecked Richard Parkers had to mean something. The novel meditates on cannibalism with its visit to the magic island and also with its haunting final section. It used to be the accepted law of the sea that in case of shipwreck, sailors would draw lots to choose who would be cannibalised so that some might survive. By naming the tiger Richard Parker, Martell seems to be emphasising it as a possible outcome for Pi. His ultimate survival feels like a kind of literary vengeance for those Richard Parkers who were less fortunate.

But more than anything, there is one quote from Life of Pi which I come back to and which comes to mind almost more than any other passage from literature:

I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always ... so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.

I think of it reasonably often and the truth of it holds clear. Fear is the thing that makes you hold still. Fear can make you turn away from that which you long for. Fear is the ice in your veins. In the words of Aarya Stark, fear cuts deeper than swords.

Life of Pi is not a perfect novel but it is one that has always spoken to me. Pi may be the ultimate unreliable narrator but I feel that in this case this is something to celebrate. The beauty of his early memories shines bright and through that his love for his family. I so often read books which include horrible happenings which I remind myself gratefully are only fictional. It is a joy to read one where the author has flipped this trope on its head and instead gifted his protagonist with a fairytale instead. If we believe Pi's story then we believe in the world we wish we could have. We believe. And belief in itself can be a gift.

I gave this book a quick try, and ultimately decided to DNF -- my tastes have changed since I requested this. Many thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book!

This is an unusual book and quite difficult to review as a result.

It follows the story of a boy who is shipwrecked with a bunch of animals, and then descends into what I would best describe as magical realism. There is a lot to enjoy and the language is wonderful, but I think it is definitely a love/hate kind of book.

I have not seen the film adaptation, but can imagine it would have been pretty difficult to capture the spirit of the book without putting in a lot more action.

Interesting read, but not really for me.

This is without question one of the best books I’ve ever read. While the movie adaptiation is great, the novel is even better. If you haven’t read this one... what are you waiting for???