Yann Martel Interview
Conducted by Jennie Renton
Life of Pi opens with scenes of the contained wildness of a zoo in Pondicherry, south-east India. The
narrator, Pi Patel, whose family owns the zoo, describes his childhood as a paradise in which his ‘alarm
clock’ was a pride of lions; on his way to school he would make his way past a pyramid of turtles and the
yellow open mouth of a hippo, a camel with a senile, lecherous expression. In 1977, when he is sixteen,
the family decides to emigrate to Canada. They take the animals with them, travelling by cargo ship
across the Pacific. But the ship sinks, leaving only five survivors: Pi, a zebra with a broken leg, an orangutan, a hyena and a Bengal tiger. Soon the only two left on the twenty-six-foot lifeboat are Pi and the
tiger. Pi finds a survival manual on navigation among the lifeboat stores, but after some months it
completely disintegrates. He has no idea how to navigate by the stars and the boat has no rudder, sails
or power. Life of Pi - the first novel from a Scottish publisher to have been shortlisted for the Man
Booker Prize - is an extravagant flight of the imagination, an implausibly plausible narrative told with
panache and conviction. Yann Martel was born in Spain and now lives in Montreal. He is the author of
Self, a novel, and a collection of short stories, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios.
In describing the deaths of the zebra, the hyena and the orang-utan you don’t spare any gory details.
Why is that quite so strong?
I live in a society that is in terrified denial of ‘unpalatable’ realities, realities I prefer to face.
Given that his travelling companion was a Bengal tiger, it seems predictable that Pi’s story will be
dismissed as fantasy. Why do you make it so far-fetched?
In order to raise certain important questions. When he arrives at the coast of Mexico after drifting
across the ocean for 227 days, Pi gives accident investigators the whole story of his ordeal. However
much he insists that it all happened, they tell him it is too fantastic to believe. Pi then gives a more
plausible version of events, which satisfies them. He had told them two stories. Both had the same
beginning: a ship leaves India. Both had the same ending: there is only one human survivor - in either
case, the investigators only have his word for what happened. Pi asks the investigators, ‘If you stumble
about believability, what are you living for?’ He says, ‘Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard
to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer.’ He wants to know why they have a
problem with ‘hard to believe’.
Does Life of Pi reflect your own spiritual quest?
Like most people, I am trying to make sense of life. What’s it all about? Why are things the way they
are? What’s my role here? Do I have a role? Every writer comes from a certain context. I had an agnostic
upbringing in Quebec, in a strongly anti-clerical, anti-religious culture. At university, where I studied
philosophy, part of my training was to cut to shreds all the proofs of God. A spiritual perspective was
missing in my life, and so I started attending mass at a Catholic church. Later, visits to holy places on my
travels to South America, India and the Middle East drew me into reading religious texts and I
discovered that while there are common themes in the teachings of the mystics of every tradition, this
doesn’t mean they are the same. The great world religions are fundamentally distinct. Christianity and
Islam are centred on ‘I’, which doesn’t imply egocentricism, rather, that individual assent is crucial, it
makes redemption possible. Whereas in Hinduism and Buddhism the self is an illusion. Mystical writings
in all traditions acknowledge the mystery of life and suggest ways of engaging with that mystery, even
though it remains impossible to comprehend intellectually. You can view the world in different ways historical, scientific, social, political - but there are limits to what you can do with a calculator or a
hammer. You must make a leap of faith to get the full flavour of life.
‘Pi’ is something of a mystery in itself in that it represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its
diameter - 3.1415926… etc - but it seems impossible to take it through to the last number after the
point.
Like ‘pi’, life is not finite. And so I didn’t make the title The Life of Pi: I deliberately left out the definite
article. That would have denoted a single life. This book is not escapist fiction. It’s to do with discovering
life through a religious perspective. Religion doesn’t deny reality, it explains it. Secular critics ask, ‘How
can you believe?’ This question doesn’t faze people with faith. Rationality is only part of the picture.
Science and religion don’t have to collide - I see them as complementary, rather than contradictory.
Science can be a gateway to the greater mystery.