Published 2002 / Length 319 pages
‘I have a story that will make you believe in God.’
Life of Pi is a bold, exciting and energetic novel in which the miraculous seaborne adventures of our intrepid young hero, Piscine Molitor Patel (aka Pi), probe the outer limits of what we are prepared to believe. It is impossible to read this expansive book, the ambitions of which are as wide as Pi’s horizon on his little mid-Pacific floating world, without an open mind. The story may defy belief, but the author takes frank pleasure in challenging his reader to take a leap of faith. ‘The better story’, Pi insists, is the one that is difficult to credit, the one whose imagination and daring fill us with a richer sense of what it is to be alive. For most readers, Pi’s fierce optimism, blazing bravely away under that endless sky, proves infectious. Prepare for wicked dashes of humour and anthropomorphism galore. This big-minded little book could just change your life.
‘I enjoyed this fantastical tale of tiger-taming in watery extremis as a story told for its own sake, until events moved beyond fiction into an illusion that uncomfortably reframed the earlier narrative, presenting the reader with the challenge that faced Pi himself: the need to believe. Matchless!’ – AGATHE, 49
• Do the preface and closing interview that sandwich the story of Pi’s odyssey make what he tells us in the middle more or less plausible?
• Martel is adamant that fear is ‘life’s only true opponent’. How does Pi cope with the fear that his situation produces in him?
• Why has the sea so often been used as a metaphor for the struggle of life itself? Is Pi’s voyage a parable for suffering and survival?
• Why do you think Martel chose to structure the book into precisely one hundred chapters – and to point out to the reader that he had done so?
• The number pi (3.14159 …) was made, in mathematicians’ early approximations, by dividing 22 by 7; Piscine Molitor Patel spends 227 days in the ocean. Mere coincidence?
• According to Martel, the name Richard Parker alludes to a cabin boy cannibalized by shipwrecked sailors in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, an 1838 novel by horror writer Edgar Allan Poe.
• Life of Pi won the 2002 Booker Prize.
• The Master and Margarita by MIKHAIL BULGAKOV – this Russian magic-realist classic shares much of Life of Pi’s imaginative abandon, heart and humanity, and features a memorably voluble feline.
• Gulliver’s Travels by JONATHAN SWIFT – an eye-opening voyage through incredible unknown worlds, though in this case the author uses the fantastical as a tool to satirize and condemn the political and social realities of eighteenth-century England.