Book Review of Life of Pi

Seeing as how its Christmas vacation and I'm getting paid to lounge about, I figured I would throw together my next book review. Earlier this year our book club read Life of Pi by Yann Martel. It's a tale about a 16 year old boy from India who has what I would describe as eclectic religious beliefs. He becomes a castaway, and the book is about his adventures (or really, two different adventures) in surviving and returning to civilization. I'll leave the plot at that in case you haven't read it and are interested in doing so at some point.

I loved this book! It's approximately 330 pages long, and after the first 300 or so, I figured it was a mildly entertaining work of fiction. But then I read to the end, and the last 30 pages really changed my perspective. Essentially Martel uses Pi's experience as an allegory for religious versus non-religious approaches to life. (At least, that is how I read it. There is fertile ground here for debate and difference of opinion.) To me, Martel's point is that being a believer is better than being a non-believer, regardless of what belief system a person adopts.

He gets to that theme by exploring the fact (or at least, what I consider to be a fact) that both religious belief and atheism are non-verifiable and require faith from their adherents. Since no human being is omniscient, or even really has the ability to know anything outside our ridiculously limited scope of experience, impressions, and sensory observations, we are told two conflicting stories and must make a choice about what we believe. With how the novel ends, I believe that Martel is saying that being a believer is the better choice. But as I mentioned, that is certainly a debateable point.

For those who have read the book, I am very puzzled about the island and am planning on rereading it some time in the future to get a better feel. Pi's first story, while more implausible, makes scientific sense until the appearance of the island. I am curious, then, as to what it is supposed to represent. Is it the religious ideal of Heaven and Hell? Or of some kind of paradise paired with some kind of punishment? That is, the island is certainly a safe haven for Pi, but also turns out to be very dangerous. Or, have I missed Martel's point entirely and the island is meant to show that the first story is simply nonsense? (This I doubt very much, as the Japanese arbiters of the two stories choose Pi's first story as the better story.)

Perhaps Martel is saying that it is better to delude oneself with a more satisfying explanation of things than to select a depressing explanation when both are equally non-verifiable and ultimately based on faith. (faith in God versus faith in mankind's suppositions about the observeable world). Yet, he leaves it ambiguous about which story is actually true. I think that was deliberate. As for me, as in life, I choose to believe that Pi spent his time at sea with Richard Parker.

This is a great book if you're looking for an entertaining story with some quality issues to ponder.