SPOILER WARNING: apparently there is a 'surprise ending' which this review gives away. Oops.

A lot of people don't like my tangential reviews. As if the discussion of ideas were simply not enough. They tell me they don't like the way i skirt around the plot of the book, its theme, its characters, its central motif - all that stuff they teach you to write about in English Lit 101. Perhaps they get upset because they want to use my review for their assignments? I get the harshest comments for my reviews on the classics ... i even had one comment, in a barbaric prose riddled with spelling mistakes criticizing me for grammatical errors! Ha! As if. The point is, readers don't seem to like my tangents.

The plot, Mark, they say. Tell us about the plot.

As if tangents exist purely for the realm of the geometer. All right already. The plot. Here you go. A cargo ship sinks in the middle of the Pacific. One lifeboat remains, holding a zebra with a broken leg, an orang-utan, a Bengal tiger, a hyena, and a 16-year-old Indian boy named Pi. It sounds like a premise for a bad joke, doesn't it? "An aeroplane conks out in mid air. On board are a rabbi, a priest, an imam and a prostitute." But no, it's not like that at all. As a bad joke, The Life of Pi is a dismal failure.

I believe The Life of Pi is about questioning what you believe. This is just what i believe, and is open to question. The book carefully sets itself up to try to make you believe it is a true story. But it is written by a writer who studied philosophy at university. Hmm. So it is bound to be a tissue of contradictions at the very least, if not a outright pack of lies.

As a writer who also studied philosophy at university, i would hazard a guess that the story is probably not what it seems to be, i.e. a simple tale about the hazards of living with animals in a lifeboat. But neither is it simply allegorical. Hey, call me reckless, but i think it is questioning what it means to believe in ideas and magic. And what is magic, but an incomprehensible idea? Some would call its style 'magic realism'. For me, 'magic realism' is just an incomprehensible style. An incoherent reality. I would call Allen Ginsberg's or William Burroughs' style 'magical realism', and as far as i'm concerned, all magical realist writers might as well be on mind-altering drugs.

Nothing wrong with that mind.

But where do we draw the distinction between recreational frivolities and fine art? Ah, ask me something hard. We can draw it wherever we darn well like. Art is defined through an immanent process of negotiation between artist, creation, and audience.

Just like words. A word, once placed in the public sphere, becomes a work of art. Ha ha. Our first question: but what does it mean?

Meaning does not exist, just lying about the place to be found. Meaning is imputed to things by literate beings. To art. To words. To pieces of literature. Meaning is abstract, ephemeral, mercurial, constructed, and deconstructed.

Animals do not have existential crises, simply because they are not literate. The meaning of life? Whatever you ascribe to it. Life just is.

If you have managed to read this far i am hoping you are not one to mistake the plot of a book for what a book is about.

The dustjacket says the book "is a triumph of storytelling and a tale that will, as one character puts it, make you believe in God."

Well - yes and no. Good storytelling but no, it didn't make me believe in the gods. But it did, praise be to Allah, draw out the tenet that to believe in anything, even in science and numbers, one must make a leap of faith. As was demonstrated in mathematics in 1931 by Godel's theorem. Just as a tangent, Godel's theorem stated that for any formal system which contains the arithmetic of natural numbers there is a formula which, if the system is consistent, can be neither proved nor disproved. It follows that it is impossible to prove the formal consistency of a system of this kind from within the system. One must either accept it as open-ended, or take a proposition (such as the principle of non-contradiction, or 1=1) as self-evident. As a given. Or, on faith, if you like.

Toward the end of the book, Pi is questioned by the Japanese owners of the sunken vessel Tsimtsum (or mustmist backwards - must there be mist?) who do not want to believe his story. However, his story can be neither proved nor disproved. Good Godel! i cry, off on one of my tangents.

Within the formal system of the novel, Pi offers them an alternative version, one in which there are only humans on the boat, who turn to cannibalism.

Pi Patel: "So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with the animals or the story without the animals?"

Mr Chiba: "The story with the animals."

Mr Okamoto: "Yes. The story with the animals is the better story."

Pi: "Thank you. And so it goes with God."

(Silence).

Mr. Okamoto: You're welcome.

... and so on, like an existential play by Samuel Beckett.

So what does The Life of Pi mean? Here's a clue. Pi is an infinitely recursive number, a simple secret of the universe. Do you take the inscrutable mystery of Pi as proof of the existence of God? Or do you prefer the open-ended approach?

Personally, i prefer the open-ended approach.

Believe nothing. Never apologise. Never explain.


Recommended: Yes