There may well be some Hindu reason for 100 chapters – but like Jesus ticking off the ancient prophecies on his way to martyrdom, I still couldn’t see why these chapters were needed in themselves. It was something that annoyed me from early on in the book – that the chapters seemed far too arbitrary and pointing it out at the end just made me more irritated. You know, in Invisible Cities Calvino has necessary chapters – this book just has 100 chapters. Just as I could not feel any necessity for the Italic voice that sounded like Tom Waits doing, “What is he building in there?” Well, except to introduce us again to Pi some number of years later. That was the other thing that I found annoying – much is made of the fact this story is told in 100 chapters – but I could not feel any necessity for many of the chapters. This is a book told as two possible stories of how a young man survives for 227 days floating across the Pacific Ocean told in 100 chapters.
This takes so long and is so incidental to the story and written in such a cutesy way that I started to pray the boat would sink, the tiger would get him … I would even have accepted God smiting him at this point as a valid plotting point, even if (or particularly because) it would bring the story to an abrupt end. The bit where he is opening his first can of water is a case in point. Parts of this were so badly over written that it was almost enough to make me stop reading. But the religious are generally terribly arrogant, so it is best not to feel insulted by their endless insults – they know not what they do. There is some fluff at the start in which atheism is ‘discussed’ (read, discarded) as something people inevitably give up on with their dying breath. The book is written by a member of that class of people who are my least favourite a religious person who cannot conceive of someone not being religious. I was a little annoyed when I found out that the person the book is dedicated to had also written a story about a man in a boat with a wild cat and had considered suing for plagiarism. Apparently, when Yann Martel wrote this he was feeling a bit down and this was his way of plucking himself up. I’m going to have to assume you have read this book, as if I don’t I won’t be able to say anything about it at all. So, being told a book is a winner of the Booker tends to be a mark against it from the start, unfortunately. The only Carey I haven’t liked won the Booker ( Oscar and Lucinda), I really didn’t like the little bit of Vernon God Little I read and I never finished The Sea despite really liking Banville’s writing. I tend to avoid the winners of the Man / Booker – they make me a little depressed.
I found a lot of this book incredibly tedious.
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