Sunday, November 10, 2002		Books

The real and the fabulous
Shelley Walia

The novel moves continuously from the fairy tale to animal fiction to philosophy and, most of all, religion, a macro-genre consisting of a blend of literary traditions that lie buried in the reader's mind and which evoke varying responses. Philosophical questions concerning freedom, human quest, heroism and fate often intermingle with the extraordinary.

Life of Pi
by Yann Martel. Penguin. Pages 319. Rs 295.

TO use the phrase lo real maravilloso (marvellous reality) of Cuban writer Alejo Carpenter for the novel Life of Pi is to show the surfacing of the precluded into the unchanging everyday reality, an invention of the world constituted by the artist and his language. The fantastic, the strange and the dreamlike mark a departure from the familiar order of things and yet it has a direct link with the historical and everyday reality. There is no need for any allegorical interpretations; the reader passes into a world of willing suspension of disbelief. Personal hang-ups are phased out and the representation of "reality" is fully accepted.

Poised between the real and the unreal, the reader is made to question this opposition that finally supplements his sense of the nature of reality. Anxiety, estrangement and isolation had already been taken up by Angela Carter while in her later work she used magic realism as a means of exploring the notion of liberation through pleasure and wonder. Yann Martel does the same, seeing no incongruity in the juxtaposition of the fabulous and the real. The super-rational experience brings out details sharply perceived, a reality that exceeds the space allotted to it by man or history. Virgina Woolf had done it in Orlando, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende have used the oxymoronic union of the real and the marvellous in their Latin American novels, Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Rushdie in Midnight's Children. But unlike them, Martel avoids the historical sweep and the exaggeration, concentrating more on minute details about life and survival, about wanting to be Hindu, Christian and Muslim rolled in one.

The sheer "pompous, portentous and pretentious fiction" of the 130 books Lisa Jardin, Salley Vickers, David Baddiel, Erica Wagner, etc, had to wade through this year was not given much heed. The Man Booker Prize was instead awarded to the magic realist from Canada. Two other Canadians have already won the Booker. Martel is the third for an endearing and uproarious yarn of a boy directionlessly loose on a lifeboat with an orangutan, a hungry hyena, a massive Bengal tiger named Richard Parker and a lame zebra. Reminiscent of Noah's Ark, Pi, a dreamy Indian lad, leaves India for Canada with his father who owns a zoo in Pondicherry. Aboard a Japanese ship accompanied by the animals in their cages the journey to Canada begins, but is soon cut short with the capsizing of the ship.

The shipwreck ends their dream, but Pi survives on a lifeboat accompanied now by a handful of animals fighting for survival on the wide Pacific, reminding you of The Old Man and the Sea or Robinson Crusoe. The animals are strangely metamorphosed into creatures with human voices. Pi talks to them on innumerable issues, including the perils of "zoomorphising animals." The novel moves continuously from the fairy tale to animal fiction to philosophy and, most of all, religion, a macro-genre consisting of a blend of literary traditions that lie buried in the reader's mind and which evoke varying responses. Philosophical questions concerning freedom, human quest, heroism and fate often intermingle with the extraordinary. All this is evocative of Italo Calvino and his over-playful mind.

For instance, Pi finds the zoo a paradise on earth and philosophises his views on freedom of animals/man: "Well-meaning but misinformed people think animals in the wild are 'happy' because they are 'free'…. The wild animal is simple, noble and meaningful, they imagine. Then it is captured by wicked men and thrown into tiny jails. It yearns mightily for 'freedom' and does all it can to escape. Being denied its 'freedom' for too long, the animal becomes a shadow of itself, its spirit broken. So some people imagine." Pi then goes on to argue that this is not true: "Animals in the wild lead lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where the supply of fear is high and the supply of food low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured… Animals in the wild are, in practice, free neither in space nor in time, nor in their personal relations.'

Comparing men with animals, Pi maintains that no intelligent shopkeeper would leave his shop and everything behind and walk away forever. If a man will not do this, why should "an animal, which is by temperament far more conservative?" The smallest changes upset them… surprises are highly disagreeable to them… In the wild, animals stick to the same paths for the same pressing reasons, season after season." The disjunction in the understanding of the real is coloured and underwritten by the thin difference with which we look at the world outside and our own individual representations of it.

The writer gives a realistic touch to a "fabulous" novel, by intervening into the narrative in italics and telling us how he moved to the north-east of India because only here can a stint "beat the restlessness out of any living creatures;" that "a little money can go a long way" and that "a novel set in Portugal in 1939 may have very little to do with Portugal in 1939." Here in a hill station he would "turn Portugal into fiction" as that is what fiction is all about, "the selective transforming of reality" and the "twisting of it to bring out its essence." The enterprise of writing this novel on Portugal fails. The writer moves to Pondicherry, where he meets Francis Adirubasamy, who tells him that he has a story "that will make you believe in God." Getting pointers from him, the narrator moves back to Canada, meets the protagonist Pi, whose full name is Piscine Molitor Patel, derived from the swimming pool in Paris and given to him by Francis, his mamaji, who is obsessed with swimming and takes on himself to teach Pi.

As in the great Spanish novel Don Quixote, the narrator gives a touch of realism to his story by digging up historical documents from which to construct the story of the picaresque hero. Martel, too, makes the narrator engage in historical excavation of tapes, documents taken from the Japanese ship, interviews with Pi as well as accounts in his diary. This imperceptibly moves the reader into a world that seemingly begins to appear real. Here is the imaginary dimension introduced into realistic evocation of the world of Pi. The real and the marvellous, thus, are never antithetical, and improvisation in art becomes a function of living in the world.