Guardian Review

The mega-selling author on faith, animals and his new novel -- and his instant rise from struggling writer to literary household name Yann Martel can pinpoint the moment when he rejected a secular worldview and "fell in love with faith". At the end of 1996, as a hard-up writer with two little-known books to his name, he backpacked to the Indian subcontinent and was, he says, "dazzled". He enjoyed visiting Hindu temples, but found himself absorbed in other religions too: "Round the corner from where the Hindu gods lived there was always a church or a mosque or a temple of another faith." Martel's upbringing had been non-religious, but in India he realised he was "tired of being reasonable"; it was leading him nowhere. His discovery of faith was bound up with another awakening -- to the wonder of animals. In India, they were everywhere, "not just the obvious sacred cows ... or the loudly cawing crows, or the tribes of monkey". In the temples he visited, he "became aware of the many animals of Hinduism: Hanuman the monkey, Ganesha the elephant-headed, Nandi the bull, Garuda the eagle, and so on". Confronted with gods and animals for the first time, he "took both of them seriously ... I bought a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and of the gospels. I camped near cows and observed them at length. I started attending masses, pujas and Friday prayers." India was not only "where gods and animals abound and rub shoulders", but a place "where all stories were possible". The story it made possible for Martel was Life of Pi, his 2002 Man Booker prize-winning novel, adored around the world, which has now, he tells me, sold nearly 13m copies. It is a set text in schools, has been translated into more than 40 languages and been adapted into a film for which director Ang Lee won an Oscar. The central metaphor of Life of Pi came to him one day like a revelation: "the animal will be divine ... and the lifeboat crossing the Pacific will be ... an odyssey of the soul across existence". The animal is, of course, a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker, the fearsome companion of Pi, an Indian boy in a boat adrift on the ocean for 227 days; the enthrallingly detailed story of survival that Pi later recounts to the narrator is, in Martel's words, all about "discovering life through a religious perspective". He has summarised the novel's subtext in three lines: "Life is a story; you can choose your own story; a story with God is the better story." As Pi asks the investigators who are reluctant to believe his implausible account: "If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for?" Following its publication and the subsequent fanfare, Martel went on a world publicity tour that lasted two whole years. He has a new novel out, The High Mountains of Portugal, and the campaign to promote this one is much shorter -- the author, 52, now has a wife, the British writer Alice Kuipers, and four children under the age of 10 ("I started late"). But there are obvious comparisons between the new book and the tour de force for which, he concedes, he will always be best-known. It is another exploration of grief, faith and the limits of reason, and it features -- even more obviously than Life of Pi -- an animal symbolising the divine. So Martel has found himself once again rehearsing his now highly polished opinions on such topics as the uses of allegory and why animals make such good characters. He is very fluent talker, who is unafraid to provide an intellectual toolkit to understanding his work or to deliver the more profound meaning-of-life messages his fiction is intended to convey. The animal-as-divine this time round is a chimpanzee. In the first of the new novel's three linked sections, Tomas, a young man who lives in Lisbon, sets out to find a centuries-old crucifix on which the form of Christ is taken by a chimp. In the second section, a pathologist conducts a surreal autopsy and discovers inside the dead body of an elderly man a bear cub (which stands for his son, who died as a boy) and, wrapped around the cub, a young chimpanzee, a symbol of Jesus and the faith that had kept the man going. In the third section, a Canadian senator decides to up sticks and move to a Portuguese village taking with him a chimp called Odo; gradually he learns to love the ape and to be more like him -- to live a simple life in the present moment -- and Odo gains "disciples" among the villagers. One reviewer, in the Boston Globe, has commented that all of this "might seem like so much pious piffle, but for Martel's drollery and ingenuity in packing his inventive novel with beguiling ideas". In general, the reception to The High Mountains of Portugal has been much more positive than that given to Beatrice & Virgil, Martel's long-awaited follow-up to Life of Pi, a fictional exploration of the Holocaust (also featuring animals). Ron Charles in the Washington Post noted that in the final section of the new book, which explores the solace the grieving senator Peter Tovy finds in the antics of Odo, "Martel's writing has never been more charming, a rich mixture of sweetness that's not cloying and tragedy that's not melodramatic." Martel says that in both Life of Pi and The High Mountains of Portugal he has, essentially, been peddling Pascal's wager: "You might as well live a godly life, because if He exists, well, great, you are going to go to heaven; and if He doesn't, well, you've still led a good life." He sees religions, for all their drawbacks, as providing a moral structure: "There's no great advantage to being a compulsive liar, or to screwing every single woman you meet; there's no great advantage to being greedy." His interest in morality and faith figures goes beyond Jesus to "Buddha or Karl Marx or David Beckham": adherence to each, he suggests, has gone beyond the rational, but still makes a kind of sense. Marxism has a moral structure too: "Marx was talking about the discrepancy between the poor and the wealthy, which is outrageous to this day. I'm so for Bernie Sanders. I don't think he's electable, but to be talking about wealth inequalities is essential." Most reviews spent little time on the connections between its three parts, which, Martel has determinedly explained, represent atheism, agnosticism and belief. In the final section, Peter and Odo the chimp share a house, wrestle and groom each other -- Martel says he expressly set out to describe "someone who finds themselves in a state of grace by actually living with a faith object". "I used a chimp," he says, "because I wanted an animal that would plausibly reflect a human being ... There is something in the social behaviour of the greater apes ... if you look into their eyes, there is something troubling, a questioning of our excessive intelligence. Because, for all our intelligence, we are destroying the planet. We are crucifying the animal world. That's why the senator aspires to be more like Odo, rather than the other way round." Apes, he has said, are "like a smoky, warped mirror of who we are, in an earlier form". "If I'd written about a chimpanzee on the cross a hundred or more years ago, it'd have been more shocking ... luckily, evangelical Christians don't read novels." (Though some did write to him complaining that Pi follows more than one religion.) "In any case it's not an insult. If the idea of Christianity is that God became human, and if humans are close to animals, then in a sense God became animal too. I wanted to expand the idea of what it means for God to be incarnate in Jesus." Martel is also keen to get across another point of comparison between animals and faith. "When I was reading about religions," he says, "I noticed a particular quality in religious figures. One is their strong sense of being right here, right now. Buddhism is all about trying to be in the present moment, but you see it in Jesus too. Animals live in the present. People, on the other hand, are always dealing with their past, and worrying about their future; the present moment seems to slip by unnoticed." Martel himself has an unworldly side. He doesn't drink, or smoke, and seems to care little about material things. He lives in an unflashy house in Saskatoon, a small city on the Canadian prairies, in the province of Saskatchewan: "I don't want to live in New York, London and Paris and be the writer with a capital W." In any case, his children, he says, keep him humble. "They are not impressed that I won the Booker prize; they aren't impressed that I wrote Life of Pi." He shows me a photograph of his beatific-looking kids: fatherhood is a kind of "religious ecstasy". He has talked winningly of benefiting from a "freak success", and remembers what life was like as an impoverished, struggling writer. Two years before finishing Life of Pi, he was living on [pound]4,000 a year: "I liked the lightness." In the author's note to a republished edition of his first book, the collection of four stories entitled The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, he writes: "I lived with my parents. Or, to be more accurate, I lived off my parents. I paid no rent, ate their food. I did short-term work -- tree planting, dishwashing, working as a security guard -- never letting these jobs get in the way of my pen ... I sent stories out. Once I sent 16 different stories to 16 different literary reviews. I received 16 rejections." The book, published in 1993, was well received but sold few copies. His first novel, Self, which followed in 1996, was an experimental exploration of gender and sex. He compares it to Woolf's Orlando : a man on his 18th birthday metamorphoses into a woman; seven years later, he turns back again. Men are so incurious about what it is actually like to be female, Martel reflects. "I read the feminist classics, and also just closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself a woman." Self sold "almost nothing". Then, with Life of Pi, he suddenly became a literary megastar. In November 2002, a month after being awarded the Booker Prize, he wrote about the experience and his surprised exultation at winning: At Heathrow, the passport officer asks me why I am visiting the United Kingdom. I pause for a moment. "I'm here to win the Booker prize," I tell him, figuring that if I win he'll remember me, turn to his mates and say, "I let that bloke in." And if I lose, he will have forgotten me." The what?" he says ... Then, on the night, at the moment the winner is announced ... I roar "Yes!" and jump up, raising my left fist in the air. I raise both my arms. I feel like Jesus Christ after he's done his three days in Hell, I feel like a boy who has just discovered the joys of self-abuse, I feel like Sir Edmund Hillary after he's stumbled to the top of Everest, all three joys all at once. The book was, unlike some Booker winners of that era, a highly accessible novel. The judges' choice was "a rip-roaring popular success", according to Salley Vickers, who was one of them. "The booksellers loved us for it." Another judge that year, Russell Celyn Jones, has written: 'We knew that we just handed Yann Martel a million bucks.' Life of Pi 's sales long ago handed Martel a secure financial future, and the Ang Lee movie, which came out in 2012, has left him further enriched. But the writer is far from gushing about the film: it "was visually ravishing" but "I thought the storytelling was a little bit weak. It's a good complement to the book. It paints some nice pictures, but I don't think it's a standalone product." Unsurprisingly, Martel's publishers looked forward to the follow-up to Life of Pi, but were a little perturbed when what he proposed was a book on the Holocaust using animals as an allegorical device. His plan was for a "flip-book", with a Beckettian "conceptual play" about the suffering of a monkey and a donkey in a cataclysm called the "Horrors", published back-to-back with a non-fiction essay about the need for representations of the Holocaust beyond historical realism. ("Where are the Holocaust romances?" he has asked. "Where are the Holocaust comedies?") The flip-book idea was rejected, as the opening of the reworked novel, Beatrice & Virgil, makes clear, but though major changes were made to the framing of the story (and Martel received an advance of something like $3m), the critical reception was harsh. The influential reviewer Michiko Kakutani called it "disappointing and perverse", another called it dull and pretentious. The general sense was that the novel hubristically tried and failed to do for the Holocaust what Orwell did for Stalinism in Animal Farm. In the Evening Standard, David Sexton was brutal: "What is one to say? Perhaps, to be kind, that Martel, not Jewish himself incidentally, is just not very bright." Its author has always staunchly defended the book -- "Some people loved it, some hated it," he tells me. Martel suggests that "we are not yet ready" for imaginative treatments of the Holocaust. And he repeatedly stresses that fiction can "get to a greater truth" than mere fact. "Novelists can get to places that no historian or journalist can," he says. One aspect of Martel's writing, which is often called his "cutesy" or "whimsical" side, was generally seen as enlivening a fantasy adventure with a tiger but judged less appropriate for the subject of the Holocaust. It is also the case that some elements within the old-style literary establishment have always been sceptical of Martel: Sexton, who so disliked Beatrice & Virgil, has written of Life of Pi that its "mystical twaddle ... sticks in the throat". And perhaps it is possible to hear some of the comments Martel makes about religion ("I really like Islam, it's a lovely religion"; "There's a moistness to Hinduism"; "Positing that there is something divine rather than not passes the time nicely") and dismiss him as an unlikely fusion of Paulo Coelho and David Attenborough. But readers enjoyed Beatrice & Virgil more than the critics, and his appeal to the general book-buying public will assuredly remain strong. After all, as a reviewer of The High Mountains of Portugal noted, his writing "hums with a vivid populism". What is certain is that although Martel admits all negative reviews hurt, he is unlikely to allow any to steer him away from his chosen theme of how fiction and faith can attain a truth beyond the factual and material. "The divine chooses to be elusive, and to hide in stories rather than facts," he tells me. And in his new book, the pathologist's wife, Maria Lozora, asks: "Why would Jesus speak in parables? Why would he both tell stories and let himself be presented through stories? Why would Truth use the tools of fiction? " It is a question the everlasting Pi might well have asked. - Paul Laity.