Yann Martel: Life of Pi (2001)

Edition: Canongate, 2002
Review number: 1240

There are several unusual aspects to the narrator of Life of Pi, Piscone Molitor Patel. The first and most obvious is his name - his father chose it because he was interested in swimming; it is a Parisian pool. Secondly, he lives in an Indian zoo where his father works as a keeper, and thirdly, he is simultaneously a devout Hindu, a devout Muslim and a devout Catholic. When his family emigrate to Canada, taking many of the zoo animals with them to new homes in American zoos, disaster strikes and their ship sinks in the middle of the Pacific, leaving Pi (as he is known) stranded in a lifeboat with a zebra, a hyena, and a tiger.

The Indian background, the religious aspects of the novel, and its air of unreality all bring to mind Salman Rushdie. Life of Pi is more genial than that suggests, as well as being full of useful tips on how to avoid being eaten if stranded on a small lifeboat with a hungry tiger. As time passes, it becomes clear that at least part of Pi's story is actually delusional, visions brought on by his ordeal; their onset is subtly introduced, so that even after the reader comes to realise that not everything Pi recounts is real (itself an ironic realisation in a novel reader), they are still unable to put their finger on when they began - possibly even right at the beginning: maybe there is no tiger.

Though the Indian background is a totally superficial reason to link this novel with Salman Rushdie, the other common ideas do suggest some kind of kinship. However, there is something missing from Life of Pi as compared to Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses. In Rushdie's work, there is an underlying (satirical) purpose to the techniques he uses - the history of the Indian subcontinent since partition in one case, the author's feelings about Islam in the other. That sort of point to the novel is missing here (or at least I didn't pick it up), and so to me Life of Pi is lacking something in literary weight.

That doesn't mean that it's not worth reading. Another connection with Midnight's Children is that it won the Booker Prize, and it has been a big favourite with book groups since its publication. Adjectives used to describe this novel in reviews that I have seen commonly include "uplifting" or "heartwarming". That sort of description often seems to be a cover up for mawkishly sentimental, but that isn't the case here; I can't say I found it any of uplifting, heartwarming, or sentimental. Amusing and interesting, that is what I would say.

Damon Galgut: The Good Doctor (2003)

Edition: Atlantic, 2003
Review number: 1226

During the apartheid regime in South Africa, the regions set aside as "homelands" were supposed to be some kind of showcase for the idea that there was some measure of freedom for black people. (The phrase used was "self-determination for native peoples".) Even then, they generally seem to have been rather sad places; the South African government used some of the less appealing land in the country for the homelands, much like the land provided by the US government for native American reservations in the nineteenth century. After the fall of the regime, the homelands were quietly reabsorbed; few other countries had even recognised their existence as independent states. The most famous place in a homeland was Sun City in Bophuthatswana, the Las Vegas of South Africa and somewhere which allowed foreigners to visit the country and have the homeland status as a sop to their consciences (but which inspired the protest song I Ain't Gonna Play Sun City).

This is the first of Damon Galgut's novels I have come across, though I gather he is quite an established South African writer. The Good Doctor is set in one of the former homelands, which remains unnamed, in a hospital in its one-time capital. The area is forgotten, the town virtually a ghost town and the hospital is empty, run by a small group of doctors well aware that a job there is a dead end posting. The place is so run down that all the difficult cases are immediately transferred to the much better equipped hospital just across the line which used to be the border.

Frank, the narrator, is a middle aged doctor who has been at the hospital for some time. He has sunk into a slothful state, in a stasis because the job promised him on arrival - to take over as head of the hospital - has not materialised even after several years. He, like the other doctors, has his own reasons for accepting the pointless life he leads at the hospital (the opposite of the stereotypical picture of doctors as dedicated), and he is quite comfortable in a settled and slothful kind of way.

But then the hospital is changed utterly by the arrival of Lawrence, a young, naive and dangerously keen doctor, newly qualified, starting a year's placement there. Because of a lack of usable space, he has to share Frank's room; the accommodation is as run down as the patient care. The Good Doctor is an account of their strange friendship, a kind of companionship based around their major differences in outlook and personality. (These differences are perhaps meant to say something about the changes apparent in personalities shaped before and after the end of apartheid.)

The Good Doctor is a slow novel, as might be expected from the location in a forgotten backwater. What is is about is more atmosphere; it is one of the best depictions of melancholy inertia I have ever read. Mind you, inertia is not that popular a topic for a novel, but it is certainly a difficult task - to make the central theme of a novel something which militates against a dynamic plot. The doctors are unhappy, but are unable to make the effort of will required to move on. The hospital, like the rest of the former homeland, is forgotten and decaying. There are echoes of other writers - the style made me think of a downbeat version of Alexander McCall Smith, and I was also reminded of Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter. (Part of both these reminders are probably due to the African setting common to all three novels - though of course I don't think that the continent is not as uniform as this might suggest!) Even with these echoes, though, The Good Doctor is an original and powerful novel.

Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake (2003)

Edition: Bloomsbury, 2003
Review number: 1213

After fifteen years, Margaret Atwood has returned not only to science fiction, but also to post apocalyptic science fiction (The Blind Assassin has in the meantime included some science fiction elements. Like Offred in The Handmaid's Tale, the narrator of Oryx and Crake (The Snowman) contrasts life after a catastrophe with life before it. But in this case the change is much more apocalyptic than the fundamentalist revolution in Atwood's earlier novel - genetically manipulated plagues have destroyed the human race except for the Snowman and a tribe of innocents, post-humans engineered to live in closer harmony with the natural world (itself now home to escaped genetic experiments - enhanced pets, watchdogs and the pigoons designed as living organ banks for use in transplants).

The world before the catastrophe is not particularly pleasant, either; it is an exaggeratedly sordid version of the present day, rather like the backgrounds to John Brunner's wonderful dystopias, though not to my mind as well done. (It is an example of how much a ghetto a genre can be that Oryx and Crake is short listed for major literary awards while Brunner received no real recognition outside the genre for his major novels.) The pre-apocalyptic stuff is more interesting than the contaminated Eden that comes after it, and there is a lot more of it in the novel.

In The Handmaid's Tale part of the impact was due to the contrast between the normal life of Offred before the fundamentalist coup and the slavery she endures afterwards. By using both of The Snowman's futures (before and after the catastrophe) here as commentaries on the trends apparent in current society, the impact of both is diminished. The isolation of the Snowman and his exclusion from the utopian society of the Children of Crake (the bio-engineered noble savages - the implication being that the only way to achieve Rousseau's influential ideal is by making major changes to human biology) also diminishes the impact of the novel, though it makes possible a connection between the character and the role of the snake in the Eden story. The allusiveness of Oryx and Crake, or at least the way its allusions are handled, reduces its power as a science fiction novel. The Handmaid's Tale also benefits in comparison by having a scenario which remains rare in the genre; that of Oryx and Crake is much more a mirror of fairly obvious current concerns about issues of genetic engineering.

The ending - the description of the catastrophe itself - works well, though the main surprise will have been worked out long before by anyone who has wondered why the Snowman has turned out to be immune to the plague. The character of the Snowman is the key one in the novel, as that of Offred is to The Handmaid's Tale; but he is really too passive for the reader to identify with him. All in all, not as good as her earlier science fiction, but still of interest.

Zoë Heller: Notes on a Scandal (2003)

Edition: Viking, 2003
Review number: 1198

In recent years, there have been a fair few tabloid scandals about teachers having affairs with pupils. Zoë Heller's second novel is about precisely this, forty year old teacher Sheba Hart and her affair with a fifteen year old boy (younger than her own daughter). The story is told by an older teacher from the same school, Barbara Covett, who has become Sheba's closest friend, and it is in her narration that Heller has written something more than just a run of the mill novel about being in this sort of situation.

For what Heller does is to use Barbara's narration to expose her character - we learn, for example, that she makes a habit of starting possessive, managing friendships with younger female teachers. As she's about to retire, the age gap between her and Sheba is almost as much as that between Sheba and the boy - a point which Heller pointedly makes Barbara ignore. Most of the novel is concerned with the relationship between the two women, as that is what Barbara is interested in, rather than the media hounding of Sheba, the court appearances or even the affair itself (which is mainly discussed as a measure of Sheba's independence from Barbara's wishes).

The inadvertent self-revelation isn't particularly subtle, but is interesting and doesn't fit into the usual convention of the more or less impersonal narrator (which even affects first person narratives in many cases - where the narrator is really the author rather than a character in their own right). Barbara is quite a bitter woman, intolerant of the foibles of any except her current favourite, and this often makes what she says about other people tartly amusing.

Issues which would be considered important parts of the plot by most writers (whether a liaison between teacher and pupil would cause different reactions according to the sexes of the individuals involved, whether a fifteen year old boy - less than a year short of the age of consent in Britain - would feel exploited by such a relationship, how the teacher's family might feel, especially when she has a daughter of about the same age, and so on) are passed over briefly in this novel, or ignored completely. It is far more about the one thing which interests Barbara - herself. Notes on a Scandal is a novel to make the reader think about self-centredness.

Barbara is not a particularly pleasant person, and her character is well portrayed as such (the contrast between the feelings evoked by the distress of other human beings and by the death of Barbara's pet cat - the one being who offers her unconditional love - is an example of the sort of method Heller uses to do this).

All in all, a fun, amusing, thought provoking if occasionally vicariously embarrassing novel, well deserving of being on the Booker short list.

Carol Shields: Unless (2002)

Edition: Fourth Estate, 2002
Review number: 1177

I have started several of last year's Booker Prize short-listed novels, but this is the first which I have felt a desire to read more than the first few pages. (I have not yet attempted Yaan Martel's Life of Pi, the winner.) The ones I put aside seemed no more than pale imitations of other writers, notably V.S. Naipaul, while Unless was able to speak to me with a voice of its own almost immediately. This is precisely why I was looking out for the half dozen short listed novels, in the hope of finding something new to enjoy. I read Unless and wrote this review before hearing of Shields' death; it made me feel that I had discovered her only just in time.

Every parent knows that eventually their child will leave them for a life of their own. For Reta Winters, middle aged author and narrator of Unless, the departure of her eldest daughter Norah has been more sudden, unusual and traumatic than most. For Norah has dropped out of life almost entirely, leaving her university course and boyfriend as well as her family to spend her days sitting on a street corner with a sign on her lap bearing the single word "GOODNESS". She won't talk to her family about her reasons for doing this, so they are left to speculate about what has gone wrong (something which comes fairly easily to the rather self-absorbed Reta) and what, if anything, can be done.

Unless is set in Toronto, something which (as Reta at one point remarks) is no longer expected to limit the market for a novel, and I was occasionally reminded of another first person narrative set in the city, Margaret Atwood's Catseye. Though both also share a feminist outlook (for some time Reta is convinced that Norah's withdrawal from the world is caused by a realisation that as a woman she won't ever get as good a deal from the world as an otherwise similar man.) Nevertheless is not as hard-edged as Atwood's writing, though it does have something of a similar air (possibly a consequence of the location and feminist sympathy already mentioned). Something which is different is that Atwood's style has the intention of convincing the reader of the sincerity of the narrator, while Sheilds makes you think that Reta manages to manifest contradictory emotions, as serene and self-observing prose proclaims violent distress and overwhelming concern for another. Nobody, of course, is completely consistent, and the contrast is obviously partly a coping strategy and partly due to guilt over her role in Norah's withdrawal, whatever that might be.

Unless has one feature which is extremely unusual. The headings of the chapters, like the novel's overall title, are single words, all prepositions and conjunctions rather than the nouns and verbs which would usually fill such a role. For me, this has the effect of giving the narrative a wistful note, though I'm not at all sure why this is. The novel generally feels similar to one of my other favourites of recent years, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. Unless is magical to read - and makes me intrigued as to what The Life of Pi must have in order to have persuaded the Booker judges to choose it rather than this novel as the winner.