Life of Pi by Yann Martel

I read this book several weeks ago, but I’ve let myself get a long way behind on these posts. I’m writing this in one go without revision, so it’s not my clearest of reviews.

You know the story by now, seeing as it’s become an Oscar-winning movie: Pi Patel, son of an Indian zookeeper, is emigrating to Canada when the ship he and his family are on sinks, leaving him floating across the pacific in a lifeboat with a Royal Bengal tiger.

There’s more to it than that, of course. Life of Pi comes in three parts, and the large middle part is the story of the boy at sea. Before that, though, you have Pi’s life story up until the voyage – the reason behind his name, Piscine Molitor Patel, his experiences at school, his upbringing at the zoo, and his unusual decision to become a practising follower of Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity simultaneously. And then there are the talks about animals, about keeping them, feeding them, about why an animal is happy in a zoo, and why they do not try to escape. Much of the early part, and some of the main part, of the book is spent establishing a basis for us to believe the unlikely story of how he survived for two hundred and twenty-seven days on a boat with a Bengal tiger.

And that’s the key to this novel, really – he has to sell to us this fantastic story, this idea that a man can live in an enclosed space with a starving tiger and not be eaten, so he spends this time telling us all the reasons why he could do so.

To be perfectly honest, I found some of these early chapters a bit of a chore, and struggled to keep myself going at times. It was all very interesting, but not all that compelling.

The better part of the novel is found in the first few days at sea. He is not at first alone on a lifeboat with a tiger: to begin with, he believes the tiger to have jumped overboard, but the boat is home to a wounded zebra, a hyena, and soon an orangutan. The tension as these creatures interact on the boat, while Pi has evicted himself onto a makeshift raft, is not badly done, although it does get a little gruesome. Once these animals are dealt with, however, it is just Pi and the tiger, which bears the unlikely name of Richard Parker.

(Martel attempts to toy with us somewhat with this name. In the first section of the book he does not say that it is a tiger at all, in order to build some mystery over this person that is mentioned so often. It all feels a little gimmicky when you already know the trick.)

The book then settles in to the long story of the days at sea, interspersed with more recollections from Pi’s childhood. Martel manages to be pretty convincing in the level of detail of how the boy survives, and it can be quite compelling at times. This whole part culminates in an even more fantastic scenario than simply the existence of a tiger aboard the lifeboat, when he reaches (bear with me) a floating island of carnivorous seaweed populated by meerkats. It’s the kind of thing to stretch credulity to its limit, but is depicted in the same vivid detail as the rest of the journey at sea so that you want to accept that this could have happened.

The final section of the novel is the shortest. It takes place after Pi has returned to land, and takes the form of a transcript of an interview of Pi Patel by men representing the insurance company for the boat that sank.

If you’ve seen some of the reviews and praise for Life of Pi, you may have encountered the claim that this is a book that could “make you believe in god”. It is in this final section where Martel presents his thesis: Having given us the story of the boy and the tiger, he presents an altogether different take on the events. The suggestion, it seems, is that either of these stories could be true – and that the person hearing the tale will choose to believe “the better story”.

I have a number of issues with this ending. Firstly, most obviously, is the claim that the book could “make you believe in god”. The book makes no real attempt to do so. Pi’s spirituality is shown to us, but it never seems to be brought to a level that is significant to his survival on the boat. The (apparent) final argument of the novel does not argue that god exists, but merely suggests that one should believe in god because it is the better story, regardless of whether it is true – a detail that handily undermines the attempted argument.

The second is in the writing of the second story. I have a suspicion that Martel was aiming for a shocking twist with the rather brutal second tale, however the story comes across as even more over-the-top and unreal than the rest of the novel. It is hard to believe this is anything other than a story intended to sound cold and brutal – but which instead verges on absurd. It’s too neat, too easy, after the first tale.

In all, Life of Pi was not quite the success I had been hoping for. A slow beginning and a solid middle, falling down somewhat in the end. I can’t help but feel that the book failed where Yann Martel attempted to be clever and pull one over on the reader. He was at his best when he was simply giving us a fantastic survival tale.

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Prior to Life of Pi I had been re-reading Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series, and I said before that I had little to share on the subject. I took a break from Earthsea to read this novel, then resumed with Tehanu – which is such a different beast, and so significant, I think I do owe it a post of its own. That will be coming next time I sit down to write a post.

Black Sheep by Ben Peek

In Black Sheep, the world is segregated, with cities divided into Asian, Caucasian, and African people. In response to the “Racial Wars” some time in the story’s past, the UN has banned multiculturalism. Within the cities, everything is controlled: culture and history are tailored to suit the group you belong to, and no contact with the other cities is ever allowed.

Isao Dazai moves with his wife and young daughter from Asian-Tokyo to his wife’s home city of Asian-Sydney, but he is dissatisfied with his life there. After speaking too freely about how he feels, he finds himself falling foul of the city’s Segregators, black-masked policemen who enforce the UN’s laws, and is convicted of being Japanese. The punishment is Assimilation, a process which removes the victim’s pigmentation, leaving them completely white from head to toe, and turns them into mindless drones used for the city’s manual labour.

In this story we see the events that led up to Isao’s arrest, the process of Assimilation itself, and what happens to him afterward, in a book that at times brings to mind both George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Of course few books would come out ahead in such comparisons, and Peek’s novel is not trying to. Rather, it uses some of the same elements of familiar dystopias – the environment of constant surveillance, the inability to trust anyone you might speak to, the farce of bureaucracy and justice designed to reach a predetermined verdict – to tell its own story.

In some ways Peek’s dystopia is closer to reality than Orwell’s classic. There is more of a human element – it is easier to understand how the people who perpetuate this regime could have come to do so. There are clever moments in the world-building, too, like this one when Isao is on the plane to Asian-Sydney, and his daughter Kyoto is given a pill to calm her down for the flight:

I said quietly, “How come you don’t give them the pill in the airport?”
“Segregator Law prohibits it,” he replied. “They say that if medication is given out at the airport, then they would have to perform surveillance there, which they say is against the United Nations Freedom Laws. It is violating our rights if they are watching all of us all the time, even though airport security does that…”

Ultimately, however, Asian-Sydney and Asian-Tokyo are too perfectly dystopian to really ring true as a potential future; what they can do is serve as an extreme example, a model of a world where issues of race are handled with the ultimate form of segregation – a strange kind of equality, with the three major race groups kept equally under the heel of a faceless – and thus raceless – regime.

The story of Isao Dazai has two main strands – the first is the exploration of the cities and how they function; the second, Isao’s need to confront his wife, who was responsible for reporting him to the Segregators. While a lot of story time is devoted to the former, with much being revealed – including some tantalising hints toward what the UN’s ultimate goal with the cities might be – that side of the story doesn’t really receive a resolution. We end with an understanding of the status quo; what moments in the story that seem to suggest something bigger for Isao prove illusory. It is Isao’s wife, Kimiko, who comes to dominate the final parts of the story, as Isao sets out to find and confront her. What results is a tense exchange that reveals two people who have never and will never understand each other. It’s a moment that seems more true and right than other possible endings would have, but an ending like that is not one that can really leave you feeling satisfied.

For me, the highlight of the novel is not the world Peek creates, or the story Isao follows outside, but the depiction of Isao’s Assimilation. These are strange, sometimes surreal scenes of a manipulated virtual reality seen from inside Isao’s perspective, and what really gives it kick is the knowledge that what you are witnessing is the deliberate, calculated destruction of a man’s mind, a process deeper and more harmful than ordinary brainwashing, one designed to ruin the victim so thoroughly that he rejects his own identity. It was quite disturbing to read these scenes and begin to understand just what was being done to Isao and what purpose each element served.

Black Sheep is a book I do think people should seek out. It’s a well-crafted dystopian novel that, though it doesn’t really offer a satisfying resolution (does a dystopian novel need to?), is still overall a satisfying read. It makes me wonder why Peek is not better known.

Redshirts by John Scalzi

When Ensign Andrew Dahl begins his first posting on the United Union Capital Ship Intrepid, it doesn’t take long to notice that people behave strangely around the ship’s commanding officers. It doesn’t take him long to realise that they’re all terrified of being selected to go on away missions – because when crewmen go on away missions, one of them always gets killed. Dahl and his friends find they need to work out what is going on and why before their own turn as victim comes around.

Redshirts is, as the title hints, a homage to Star Trek and similar science fiction television, turning around the idea of “redshirt” characters – disposable extras routinely killed off to increase the dramatic stakes of an episode. In this novel, the redshirts are centre stage, and the would-be heroes – the Captain, the Science Officer, the Doctor – are side characters. It exists in part as a commentary on the tropes of those science fiction shows, and particularly the lazy narrative devices they sometimes resort to.

(Early on, after being given a seemingly impossible task by Science Officer Q’eeng, Dahl is introduced to The Box. No one knows how The Box works, but when they are given a job to do by the officers, especially one with a time limit, they put it in the Box, and it spits out the answer at exactly the right moment for maximum drama.)

Scalzi’s narrative becomes increasingly metatextual as the book goes on, and we delve into the how and why of these characters’ circumstances. I’m loath to spoil too much of this one (which is unusual for me), but suffice to say that the premise of the book allows him to cleverly both make use of and subvert those science fiction tropes, with a level of ironic self-awareness that makes for some quite funny moments. If anything, it’s clear that Scalzi has a strong hold of his narrative, and many times when something stood out as being too obvious or not making sense, it turned out to be a deliberate move on his part.

Considering that, and the way he keeps the story moving along at a decent pace, it’s easy to forgive him the one big plot hole that doesn’t get explained away.

Redshirts is clever, funny, and engaging – which is pretty much what I’d expect from John Scalzi anyway.

The Jewels of Aptor by Samuel R Delany

The Jewels of Aptor was Samuel Delany’s first published novel, way back in 1962. Having read no Delany before, I found this book on a remainders table in a Bookworld, and picked it up.

Geo, a poet, his friend Urson, and a four-armed boy named Snake find themselves tasked by the White Goddess Argo Incarnate to travel from their home in Leptar to the dangerous island of Aptor, to rescue her daughter (also Argo Incarnate) and retrieve the last of three jewels belonging to the dark god Hamas. It is one of those old fashioned post-apocalyptic sci fi adventures, really. The setting is an unrecognisable earth 1500 years after nuclear war; cultures and countries are entirely transformed. Mutants are common, and strange mutant species abound on the island of Aptor. There are hidden cultures that still use and understand technology, while the protagonists are unfamiliar with words like “radio”. In much of this it’s similar to books in the “Dying Earth” genre, named for Jack Vance’s work.

Delany’s descriptions are sparse: often he gives only the barest details, enough to allow the reader’s mind to fill in the rest of the image. When Urson and Geo first appear, for example, this is how Urson is described:

The bigger one threw a great shadow that aped his gesticulating arms on the crowded buildings. His bare feet slapped the cobbles like halved hams. His shins were bound with thongs and pelts. He waved one hand in explanation and rubbed the back of the other on his short, mahogany beard.

Delany builds a picture with a few short lines, of both Urson’s appearance and his character. There are other times, as well, where he eschews unnecessary detail: When a character loses an arm, we are never told which arm it was.

Though there is plenty of action and fantastic sights on their adventure, what makes this story tick is the mystery it is built around. Right from the beginning, it is unclear who can be trusted. Argo’s motives seem suspect. Snake, a mute, showed up too conveniently for Geo and Urson to believe it was chance. And the first mate of the ship they travel on seems to be out to kill them. As they uncover more groups working on and around the island itself, the question of who is working with whom and to what purpose only gets bigger. The first mention of the White Goddess Argo and the Dark God Hamas seems to set you up for a black-and-white morality, but nothing is so clear cut.

Much of this mystery arises from Geo himself, who rarely takes things on face value and will readily deduce some alternate explanation for what he has just seen – at times the ease of his logic is a little hard to believe. Also somewhat hard to swallow was the final revelation of the book, which seemed to centre on the idea that a religious experience could be induced fairly reliably by simply traumatising a person then exposing them to tranquility.

The book is a clever one, though, and Delany’s refusal to ever take the easy or obvious answer makes it all the better. It’s not a book I think will particularly stand out for me, but it was an interesting one, and worthwhile.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Between this and Jeff Smith’s Bone, I’ve been spoiling myself with good fiction this week.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is the story of Mary Katherine Blackwood (“Merricat”), who lives with her sister Constance and their Uncle Julian in the Blackwood family home. The rest of the family is dead, poisoned six years earlier – Constance had been accused of their murder, but was acquitted. Now Uncle Julian is crippled by the same poisoning; Constance never travels further than the garden; and Merricat herself only ventures out into the village twice a week for groceries, where she is subject to cold looks, loud gossip, and the taunting of local children.

The sisters live a simple life of routine: Constance gardens, cares for Julian, and spends much of her time cooking; Merricat lives by a strict schedule of days, each day having its own activity (Monday, neaten the house; Tuesday and Friday, buy groceries; Wednesday, check the fence; and so on). Merricat has a strong sense of ritual, and a kind of sympathetic magic – burying items or choosing magic words that will protect them from change so long as they aren’t discovered. There are things we are told that Merricat is not allowed to do – she may not prepare food, or touch knives, for example – but as her narrative draws us along, one begins to suspect that these rules are in fact self-imposed. Early in the story, the sisters’ weekly visitor Helen Clarke arrives for tea accompanied by a nervous guest, and Merricat taunts the other woman about her reluctance to drink; later, after thinking about those weekly visits, she “decide[s] that from now on [she] would not be allowed to hand tea cups.”

There’s a sense that these rules, restrictions, and rituals are things Merricat uses for penance and for self-protection, but she would never openly admit as much. Mary Katherine is always straightforward, matter-of-fact, but never directly addresses the reasons for her behaviour – in Merricat’s narrative, there are no explanations or excuses needed, because everything just is. As a result this is a novel of unspoken depths, where what is said is only as important as what remains unsaid. There’s such a rich subtext behind the whole story that is brought to life by Merricat’s childish-but-knowing voice.

Conflict in the story arrives in the form of Cousin Charles, son of an estranged uncle who had severed all ties with Constance following the trial. Now the uncle is dead and has left no inheritance, so Charles appears, ostensibly for a short visit, but in reality he seems to have every intention of claiming the house – and the wealth he believes it holds – for himself. The sisters have no use for wealth, and Merricat’s habit of burying valuable things horrifies (the most likely destitute) Charles.

To Merricat, Cousin Charles is an intruder, a stranger bringing change into the household, and more worryingly, into her relationship with Constance. The two clash constantly, Charles demanding that Merricat needs discipline (and using this to undermine Constance’s confidence in herself as a caregiver), while Merricat uses her sympathetic magic to try and drive Charles – who she considers a “demon and a ghost” – away. Their arguing escalates to the point where it inadvertantly results in the violent release of the entire village’s pent-up hatred for the Blackwood family.

Following this climax, the two sisters retreat into even deeper isolation than before, severing themselves entirely from the village, reducing their world down to just a kitchen and a garden. Charles, having seen the house ruined, vanishes from their lives again (though not without one final attempt to profit from them). But as the sisters grow more isolated and insular, their happiness increases. In a sense it is a retreat, a refusal to confront the problems they have or to face their friends and enemies. They refuse the complexities of life in favour of their garden, their food, and the company of each other. They are, in a sense, broken by what has happened to them, but in denial and retreat they somehow find a kind of contentment.

“Poor strangers,” I said. “They have so much to be afraid of.”
“Well,” Constance said, “I am afraid of spiders.”
“Jonas and I will see to it that no spider ever comes near you. Oh, Constance,” I said, “we are so happy.”

It is a beautiful book.

The Fifty Year Sword by Mark Z. Danielewski

One sword will kill a season. One will kill a country. One I’m making now will even kill an idea.

The Fifty Year Sword is a short novella that was originally released as a highly limited run in 2006, and was later turned into a live performance piece; it was finally reprinted in a wider release in 2012. The story concerns a seamstress, Chintana, who attends a 50th birthday party – which turns out to be thrown for the woman who broke up Chintana’s marriage. Rather than face the other people attending, she instead attaches herself to a group of five orphans who are waiting to see a storyteller – the man that arrives is strange and dark, and tells them a tale of revenge and a search for a sword, which he carries with him in a long box with five latches. It is, in essence, a kind of ghost story. The man is unexplained, his reasons for revenge mysterious, his story perhaps inappropriate for the children but exactly right for Chintana.

The story is told in a jumble of fragments, a series of colour-coded quotation marks attributing the words to five different speakers – anonymous, but perhaps the children from the story-telling recounting the events much later. I tried to keep track, at first, of which colour spoke each part, but the lines are too fragmented to really make sense of the individuals behind them, and I found in the end it was much easier to simply let the story carry me along without worrying much about what these five voices meant. I imagine the live performance of The Fifty Year Sword must have been quite something, with five actual speakers lending their voices to this jumble.

The quotes do lend an extra layer of unreality to the already strange story: if the introduction is to be believed, these are fragments of five separate interviews, along with the occasional unquoted interjection, cut up and rearranged and put back together into a “perhaps altogether alternate history of one October evening in East Texas”.

The book itself is a piece of art. It seems every Mark Z. Danielewski book is in its own way. It’s not just the words on the page, it’s the format, the layout, the colours – the entire presentation of the book in its physical form. This book is illustrated throughout with stitching, shapes in coloured thread that reflect and enhance the content of the story. The threads appear as if stitched into the pages themselves, surrounding and sometimes severing the words. When the story-teller travels in valleys, the threads form mountain walls around the words; when the forest closes in around him, the threads form an increasingly chaotic tangle of branches and streamers. Blades in the story appear as slashes in paper, stitching forming the hilts. The red stitches of the book’s own binding become visible at regular intervals along the central seam. This is real evidence of why paper books will never be totally replace by digital ones.

It is a beautiful book, and I enjoyed it thoroughly, brief as it is. I found it much easier to get into than Only Revolutions, Danielewski’s most recent novel, and it now comes pretty close to his superlative House of Leaves among my favourites.

[Interior image from book taken from this blog post, where you can see several other images of its excellent design.]

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Words WordPress “proofread” doesn’t know: unquoted, attaches.

The Unblemished by Conrad Williams

The Unblemished is one of only a very few horror novels I’ve read, so I don’t have a lot of context, here. Nevertheless, here are my thoughts on it.

A young woman, Claire Hickman, is subject to a brutal attack which leaves her traumatised and strangely altered. Claire’s mother, Sarah, is on the run from a dangerous killer who has designs on her daughter. A photographer, Bo Mulvey, is offered a map by a strange man, and finds himself unwillingly playing a role in the return of a race of flesh-eaters. It is those flesh-eaters the title refers to: their appearance is that of a human, but one too perfect in symmetry and shape. “They do not abide scars of any kind, nor marks.”

This is an incredibly violent novel. Death and the eating of flesh is everywhere. We see through the eyes of a man who likes to rape women whose legs have been freshly amputated; another man who likes to kill young girls and eat their organs. Some moments are genuinely shocking, many are disturbing, but there are times where the extremity of violence verges on farce – fortunately Williams seems aware of this, and the more extravagant scenes are sometimes peppered with moments of black humour, such as when Gyorsi Salavaria, the aforementioned killer of girls, arrives at a hotel in London:

The clean were warehousing the dirty.
A conference suite was being used as a walk-in larder. Bodies were being stripped, laid out, shorn, disembowelled, marked with indelible pen: BEST BEFORE 3/1/09. Short, shocked screams were impacting against the walls and ceiling like sporadic gunfire. The atrium swimming pool was crimson, topped with pink foam and body parts that rolled this way and that in the delicate ebb and flow. A man in a dinner jacket, his bow tie loose, hanging at his collar, strolled along the corridor holding a human rib in each fist, blood splashed like a gunshot wound to his mouth.

Within the violence, there’s a use of small, incongruous details that serve, at times, to emphasise the horror, to banalise it, or to make it almost comical – a tactic that makes striking images out of something that could have been mindless gore.

On the story side, the book’s mythology is that of a secret history of London, a tale of an ancient, deadly race that played a major role in ending a crisis in the city, but was driven out, into hiding, and forgotten by history. The characters, Bo Mulvey in particular, takes us touring around many locations in London, and the book often evokes the idea of these modern streets following the lines of roads that date far back into the city’s history.

The flesh eaters are an excellent enemy – creatures almost entirely indistinguishable from humans, beautiful, but whose mimicry of human behaviour is limited. It feeds into a real paranoia that people can sometimes feel when in an unfamiliar place, around strange people. At one point Sarah and her companion, Nick, enter a crowded pub, only to slowly realise that none of the other patrons are drinking, or even talking about anything meaningful – it’s as if, Sarah observes, they were surrounded by extras on a TV show. And these creatures are capable of sudden, extreme violence, so that their brutality slowly pervades, then overwhelms, the city.

I felt that there were some odd decisions in the plotting. Malcolm Manser, the serial killer who begins the novel as Sarah’s aggressor, seems underused, spending half of the novel setting up the arrival of Gyorsi Salavaria into the action, then the other half simply moving toward the finale. Gyorsi himself is a character built up early on who in the end proves of little importance to the outcome – it would have been entirely possible to remove his character and have most of his role in the plot (apart from a certain amount of exposition) taken up by Manser himself.

There are minor characters that come along in the story only to be forgotten later. Bo rescues a policeman from invaded Scotland Yard, but seemingly abandons him shortly afterward – the rescue scene provides more insight into the creatures, but is ultimately unimportant. Toward the end, as characters meet up and a group is formed, the book takes a brief foray into ensemble horror movie territory – even down to following the rule that sex equals death – only for the surviving secondary characters to be (literally and figuratively) dropped shortly after, with their eventual fate only presumed. Claire Hickman is less a character than a plot device – she exists to motivate Sarah Hickman’s actions, as well as serving the book’s macguffin.

The book’s climactic scenes, too, are a mixed bag. There is a fairly satisfying confrontation between Bo and Sarah and a particularly nasty creature that served as Bo’s nemesis; beyond that, the two protagonists seem to serve mainly as catalysts toward the final outcome, rather than acting themselves. For the most part I think perhaps this ending suffered because of the flaws already mentioned: the redundancy of the two killers, and Claire’s existence as object rather than person. The ending was fitting, but the execution of it didn’t quite feel right.

I haven’t managed to touch upon everything I could have; there are a lot of things the book did get right. All in all I did enjoy reading The Unblemished – it’s a book with good writing, evocative images, interesting ideas; but the plotting just left something to be desired.