Martel's cerebral followup

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Author Yann Martel (CNS)

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Beatrice & Virgil

By Yann Martel

Knopf Canada,

197 pages, $30

It's interesting. It's eccentric. It's short. It's arty. It's self-indulgent. It's didactic. It's no Life of Pi.

Yann Martel's new novel, Beatrice & Virgil, arrives with as many expectations as any novel in Canadian publishing history.

His last outing, in 2001, an allegorical adventure about an East Indian boy cast adrift on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, propelled the obscure Montreal author of two previous titles to international literary fame.

Life of Pi won the British Booker Prize, sold in the millions and placed around Martel the aura of a spiritual guru. In interviews surrounding his Booker win in 2002, he happily discussed his next project, something most writers avoid doing.

It would be an allegory about the Holocaust, also involving animals, in which a donkey and a howler monkey travel around a landscape represented by, of all things, the back of a shirt.

He has delivered that novel, or perhaps he has not. The Beatrice of his title is indeed a donkey, Virgil a howler monkey. (He takes their names from Dante's Divine Comedy, which like many of his allusions, he explains in the text.)

But they are not characters in the novel per se. They are characters in a play written by a character in the novel. Henry is an elderly and taciturn taxidermist whose personality and background provide the novel's central mysteries.

Beatrice & Virgil's main protagonist, also named Henry, is a Canadian writer, a writer who sounds like Martel himself, a multilingual son of globe-trotting diplomats.

Henry has published a novel (though under a pseudonym), one involving animals and some disturbing violence, which "had won prizes and was translated into dozens of languages."

Henry's followup, five years in the writing, Martel tells us, focused on the Holocaust. It contained both a novel and a complementary essay. The two pieces were to start at opposite ends and meet in the centre of a "flip book."

Over lunch in London, four editors, a historian and a bookseller tell him that his brilliant concept is "a complete unpublishable failure."

Devastated, Henry and his wife move abroad to a big city, "a storied metropolis where all kinds of people find themselves and lose themselves."

In real life, Martel lives in Saskatoon, where he moved in 2003 for a term as writer-in-residence at the public library. He and his wife, the British writer Alice Kuipers, have one child.

And as he confirmed in a pre-release interview in a Toronto newspaper earlier this week, he did have his Life of Pi followup rejected by his publisher.

In the novel, meanwhile, Henry takes up the clarinet, walks his dog, joins an amateur theatre troupe and gets a job in a café. His wife gets pregnant.

But then Henry receives an envelope from a reader of his famous novel. Inside is a yellow-highlighted photocopy of an obscure parable by 19th-century French writer Gustave Flaubert of Madame Bovary fame.

At this point, Beatrice & Virgil breaks with novelistic convention. Martel devotes more than 10 pages to quotation from the Flaubert story interspersed with Henry's reaction to it.

The envelope also contains a scene from a manuscript of the play involving Virgil and Beatrice. The scene is astonishingly static, and Martel produces it, too, at length.

It turns out that the taxidermist wants Henry's help with his play. Henry goes to meet him in his shop, which Martel describes as an exotic land unto itself, and they form an unlikely friendship discussing this clunky play, whose thematic preoccupations, we gradually learn, mirror those of Henry's rejected novel.

Meanwhile, Martel offers a set piece on the nature of taxidermy, the art of "extracting and refining memory from death." He delivers loving, almost sensual, descriptions of the two animals, the monkey "clever and nimble," the donkey "stubborn and hardworking."

He muses, too, at length on the craft of writing, and the fundamental impossibility of using words to capture reality.

He continues with scenes from the taxidermist's play, which is called A Twentieth-Century Shirt and echoes of Beckett's Waiting for Godot. It represents a kind of animal holocaust, with obvious parallels to the human one in Europe, including scenes of torture and cruelty, presented in the same graphic language Martel used in parts of Pi.

Although Martel's prose is artfully simple and clear, the novel's tone has a scholarly rather than literary feel. It often reads like a philosophical tract, or occasionally like the short essays he writes for his dubious blog, What Is Stephen Harper Reading?

He uses some graphic devices, an odd list, and a coda, called Games for Gustav, that appears to come from his own abandoned novel. He cites Samuel Beckett and Primo Levi, the classical Roman author Apuleius and Emanual Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto historian.

Despite all this, the novel maintains something of a narrative pulse. Henry's obsession with the taxidermist causes him domestic strife. Even his pets quarrel. Eventually the taxidermist's background become clear, though the ending seems convenient and a bit false.

Fundamentally, Beatrice & Virgil strikes notes that are too self-consciously intellectual to succeed as mainstream fiction. But those who enjoyed the cerebral aspects of Life of Pi will find things to admire.

Clearly, it has taken a long time for Martel to purge himself of this material. May he move on to smaller topics with larger meanings.

Arts columnist Morley Walker edits the Free Press Books section.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 10, 2010 H10