"Life of Pi" by Yann Martel

I read this winner of the 2002 Booker Prize nearly twenty years ago and I had remember it mostly as the story of survival following a shipwreck with a funny joke about religion. I have more recently seen the National Theatre production (see below the byline). But rereading it I realised what an incredibly well-written book it is.

It's beautifully paced with a four-part structure:

The first quarter of the book is concerned with Pi's childhood in Pondicherry, the ethics of zoo-keeping, and his discovery of religions (culminating in the moment I had remembered when a priest, an imam and a pandit converge on him in the street. The turning point is when the family sell their zoo and begin their voyage, with animals, across the Pacific. And the ship sinks.

The second part of the book concerns Pi's survival as the hyena devours the zebra and kills the orang utan and then the tiger kills the hyena. The turning point comes when Pi realises that if he is to survive, he will have to tame the tiger.

The third part of the book is the battle for survival. The turning point comes when he goes blind and encounters another blind ship-wrecked sailor (French, a food expert) who, however, is killed by the tiger.

In the fourth part of the book he regains his sight and lands on a floating island, full of mysteries which he later has to abandon. At the 90% mark he reaches land. Then he is interviewed by Japanese salvage experts who suggest that his story cannot be true. He offers them an alternative. 

That twist in the end is very clever. Suddenly, the reader realises that the yarn spun may not be true. But it was so well told, that it seemed true.

And there is a frame. Some of the chapters, italicised, purport to be the author interviewing the real-life hero of the Life. This technique adds verisimilitude. It culminates in Pi scoffing at those who disbelieve his story on the grounds that no tiger was found in Mexico: “And they expected to find - ha! In the middle of a Mexican tropical jungle, imagine! Ha! Ha! It's laughable, simply laughable. What were they thinking?” (Ch 11) This is the author teasing our understanding of reality. Even if we don't believe Pi's tale, we are still tempted to believe that he exists.

There are some wonderful descriptions:

• After drinking water following severe dehydration: “Blood started flowing through my veins like cars from a wedding party honking their way through town.” (Ch 51)
• Lightning at sea: “For two, perhaps three seconds, a gigantic, blinding white shard of glass from a broken cosmic window danced in the sky.” (Ch 85)

Selected quotes: 

• “Reason, that fool’s gold for the bright.” (Ch 1)
• “In many ways, running a zoom is a hotelkeeper's worst nightmare ... the guests never leave their rooms; they expect not only lodging but full board; they receive a constant flow of visitors, some of whom are noisy and unruly. ... There is much cleaning to do, for the guests are as unhygienic as alcoholics ... Each guest is very particular about his or her diet ...To speak frankly, many are sexual deviants ... regularly affronting management with gross outrages of free sex and incest.” (Ch 4)
• “Animals in the wild live lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where thes supply of fear is high and the supply of food low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured. What is the meaning of freedom in such a context?” (Ch 4)
• “To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.” (Ch 7)
• “What is the Ramayana but the account of one long, bad day for Rama?” (Ch 17)
• “If God on the cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ.” (Ch 14)
• “Our encounters always leave me weary of the glum contentment that characterizes my life.” (Ch 21)
• “Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer?” (Ch 37)
• “Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness - how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I've got!” (Ch 60)

October 2025; 319 pages

First published by Knopf in Canada in 2001

My paperback edition issued by Canongate Books in 2018

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

National Theatre production of 'Life of Pi'
I saw the National Theatre production of ‘Life of Pi’ on 30th March 2023 screened live to the Beacon cinema, Eastbourne.

I hadn’t really understood the book and I was initially sceptical about a play with puppets. I mean, puppets! I had heard of the NT production of Equus, using puppet horses but I had seen the production of Equus at the Theatre Royal Stratford (Saturday 23rd March 2019, matinee) and in this a male actor, Ira Mandela Siobhan, wearing only shorts bent forward slightly and stuck his arms in from of him as though they were the stiff forelegs of a horse and moved his body so that I believed he was a horse. Somehow he could manage to ripple his muscles in the way that you can see shivers running through a horses flanks; somehow he twitched and shyed and nuzzled exactly like a horse. It was perhaps the most remarkable purely physical performance I have ever seen any actor give; the first time I have experienced the production’s best performance be one entirely without words. So I doubted that puppets (one up from the masks of a Greek chorus) would be good enough for the suspension of disbelief that I need to fully immerse myself in the experience.

And, indeed, at first I was too concerned with the mechanics. They were distracting. I was reminded of when I took my stepson Paul to the Jorvik centre in York. He must have been about thirteen or fourteen, a young lad with a scientific bent. We sat in a carriage which moved around the exhibits on some sort of rail, stopping and starting, and he spent most of his time trying to work out how the thing worked rather than enjoying the show. That’s how I was at the start of this play.

But by the end of the first half, when the animals fought on the boat, I was so involved that I felt squeamish when the hyena disembowelled the Zebra, and distressed when it tore the throat out of the Orangutan. So. It worked. And the staging was equally brilliant. A boat rose from the floor of the stage. The storm, in which water came aboard the ship, was done with lights. When Pi went overboard and was drowning he was carried by stagehands and it really felt as if was sinking through the water as puppet fish swarmed around him. The whole thing was stunning. Truly immersive. Wow.

As for the lead actor himself, Hiran Abeysekera, he was amazing. He was on stage all the time, in what was often a very physical performance (he must have incredible stamina and agility) and he delivered some very funny lines with a deadpan wide-eyed innocence; it was a stupendous performance.

A great evening.