Life of Pi is a terrific book. It's fresh, original, smart, devious, and crammed with absorbing lore.
- Margaret Atwood
In 1997, Canadian novelist Yann Martel was at a crossroads. On a working holiday in India, his novel in progress had gone stale. He had two books published, neither of which had received any critical acclaim to speak of nor made the slightest impact in the literary world. After thirty-three years of living with little to show for it, Martel says, "I felt dry and indifferent. Emotions were a bother. My mind was turning into a wall."
Life of Pi begins with an Author's Note, which Martel asserts is mostly true, describing this state of artistic despair. It then proceeds with exposition of characters and events in the story -- but still within the confines of the Note, and as such presented as fact.
In this way, the most crucial question addressed in the novel is introduced: the distinction between truth and fiction, and whether or not it is important.
First and foremost, Life of Pi is a defence of leaps of faith. As with many works in this genre, it encourages the reader to suspend his or her disbelief and embrace the improbable. Through this it puts forward the idea that psychological truth carries more import than strictly objective and factual truth, and through it we can come to new realisations of self: a character early on claims that the story of Pi Patel's miraculous survival of two hundred twenty-seven days adrift on a raft in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger "will make you believe in God".
A storyteller, in order to enchant, must lie, and then must convince us that he is not lying. This novel is all about storytelling.
- The Globe and Mail
Martel's fiction is intricately crafted with impeccable attention to detail, every aspect carefully researched, but it never once smacks of anything other than a factual narrative, even where it might be expected. The animals on the lifeboat with Pi after everything he knows is lost in a shipwreck are so commonly anthropomorphised -- a hyena as cowardly, an orang-utan as maternal, a zebra as esoteric and exotic -- that the reader can't help but expect that these animals will be no different; the realisation that Martel's careful attention to realism isn't going to falter is surprising and disarming.
The tiger who shares the lifeboat with Pi, named Richard Parker (due to a "clerical error"), is also not anthropomorphised; Martel never lets his reader forget that, despite the strangeness of the situation, Richard Parker is a wild animal. He never forms an emotional attachment with Pi. This is brought home when, near the end of the novel, Richard Parker disappears into the forest without a trace and never returns. At no point in the novel are the depictions of any animals coloured with sentimentality.
The disappearance of Richard Parker is what allows the theme of the novel to become evident in the third section. Because he is gone, there is no evidence that Pi's story is true; he tells it to the representatives from the shipping company, and they don't believe him.
This leads to the creation of another version of the same story; this time, however, instead of animals on the raft there are people, and after two hundred and twenty-seven days adrift Pi is the only survivor. Somehow this second story, told with hardly any details and only in passing, seems more believable; and here lies the single most important concept in the novel:
So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?
This is the leap of faith around which the novel revolves, and serves as its conclusion. It might not make you believe in God, but it will certainly prompt you to reconsider the nature and importance of faith.
Sources:
Yann Martel, Life of Pi. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2001.
www.powells.com/fromtheauthor/martel.html
As well as two speeches given by Yann Martel on his novel, among other things, one at the 2004 Saskatchewan Book Awards and the other at a high school. | 
