Beatrice and Virgil

I finished Yann Martel's third novel today; Beatrice and Virgil.  It's the first of his works I've read which is, I suppose, a mildly sacrilegious statement to make if you want to lay claim (as I do) to an interest in literature.  How could you not have read Life of Pi, Douglas?  At your age?  Dunno, is all I can tell you although I did see the movie.  Will that get me off the hook?  Probably not because I was drawn principally by the fact it was directed by Ang Lee. As an aside - the film is still the best 3D movie I've seen; truly astounding in places, visually breathtaking.

Back to Beatrice and Virgil, though.  It's somehow both ambitious and timid; daring in the idea that underpins the novel but it bottles out.  It's simple really - if you're going to toy with the conceit of an allegorical tale about the Holocaust I think you need to commit entirely to the idea or you're bound to end up falling short of your ambition.  Animal allegories can and do work.  Animal Farm works.  Watership Down works.  Beatrice and Virgil doesn't work and the problem is the injection of the quasi-realist but barely plausible tale about the blocked writer and old taxidermist.  It keeps butting into and undermining the animal allegory.  

There's also a problem - for me anyway - with the allegorical part.  This may seem a bit harsh - and I accept that only on the day I have ANYTHING published will I posses even an ounce of credibility when it comes to literary criticism - but when you read Mr Martel's frankly derivative script for the 'lost' play you realise again how remarkable and brilliant is Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot (on which '20th Century Shirt' seems - too obviously - to be based).

I liked these components:

•  The writer's idea and ambition, neither of which were sufficiently realised. (sadly).

• "The use of animals in his novel, he explained, was for reasons of craft rather than sentiment. Speaking before his tribe, naked, he was only human and therefore possibly - likely - surely a liar. But dressed in furs and feathers, he became a shaman and spoke a greater truth. We are cynical about our own species, but less so about animals, especially wild ones. We might not shelter them from habitat destruction, but we do tend to shelter them from excessive irony." pages 29 - 30

• The games for Gustav, the most effective and affecting section of the novel.  Its few pages sit in stark contrast to everything that preceded them; a reminder, in a sense, of what doesn't work in what came before.

• The initial description of the back room at the taxidermist's shop.

So ... a bit of a disappointment but I hold on to my high hopes for Pi.

An afterthought.  It's not Yann Martel's fault he received - if the story is true - an advance of maybe $2 Million or $3 Million for this novel, the follow-up to Life of Pi.  But it's hard not to imagine the panic that must have descended on the commissioning editor or publisher when the draft was submitted.  

"$3 Million in advance for this ... ? Oh shit!"