What: Yann Martel book reading
Where: Bolen Books, Hillside Centre
When: Friday 7 p.m.
Admission: Free
Yann Martel witnessed a pair of autopsies while researching his latest novel.
It seems he attended in a, well, unofficial capacity. Certainly Martel didn’t want details regarding location to be reported. Not even the name of the city where the postmortems took place.
On Friday, he’ll visit Victoria’s Bolen Books to read from his new book The High Mountains of Portugal. The novel offers a detailed description of an autopsy. It’s a fanciful portrayal, mind you. Discovered inside the dead man’s chest is a chimpanzee. And the chimp is clasping a bear cub.
Martel, speaking from his Saskatoon home, described the autopsies he attended. One was on an old man. The other was on a fellow in his 20s.
“This was a young man who clearly didn’t have a well put-together life. A life presumably of substance abuse and ill education. Probably not enough love. He probably woke up that morning not realizing that’d be his last day,” Martel said.
The more he spoke, the more Martel’s take on human dissections seemed a bit unusual. Or at least, singular. He was, for instance, struck by the vividness of the colours: “I didn’t quite realize how beet-red flesh was, how bright yellow fat is.”
And Martel noted human innards aren’t at all like the well-ordered illustrations you see in medical books.
“Not at all. It’s a sort of glistening soup. It’s amazing this goopy, glistening soup was ever alive.”
He achieved international fame for his 2001 novel Life of Pi. In the literary world, it was a blockbuster of Michael Jackson-like proportions, selling more than 12 million copies. The book won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction — one of the most prestigious honours a novelist can attain.
Martel is a precise writer who combines sharply observed detail with wild flights of the imagination. Life of Pi is about a boy, adrift in the Pacific Ocean, who must share his lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. The High Mountains of Portugal has a character who reacts to grief by always walking backward. The novel also features a Canadian senator who retires to Portugal with his good pal Odo, who happens to be a chimpanzee.
As part of his research, Martel undertook backward-walking excursions in Saskatoon, just to get a better notion of what he was writing about. He noticed that, while locomoting in reverse, one must make a conscious attempt to lift up one’s feet.
“In a sense, I had to re-learn to walk to get a stride — a gait that was comfortable,” the 52-year-old writer said.
Didn’t people watching think it was odd? Martel said there were few witnesses.
“I didn’t do it downtown. Ididn’t do it in a shopping mall. I did it on the sidewalk here [near my home] in the middle of the day, where I don’t think anyone particularly noticed me.”
Both Life of Pi and The High Mountains of Portugal are essentially explorations of faith, Martel said. In the latter, the backward-walking man, Tomas, loses both his lover and his son. The grief-stricken unfortunate embarks on a journey, a spiritual quest, in which he endures physical and mental trials and tribulations rivalling Job’s.
While Martel is interested in the subject of faith, he’s quick to add that, as a member of “the secular mainstream,” he’s curious in a dispassionate way.
One thing that intrigues him is how faith endures in modern times despite the triumph of science and technology. His curiosity is also piqued by how (at least in the United States) Christianity has come to be associated with the political right. He noted that American right-wingers tend to be passionate about gun ownership and pursuing wealth.
“I don’t see how Jesus would in any way recognize Himself in them. If anything, Jesus would recognize himself in Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.”
There are similarities between literature and religion, Martel observed. Both employ story-telling as a way of revealing larger truths. These tales, whether one believes them or not, are important as a way of defining who we are and the world in which we live.
Martel said if society completely rejects religion, then it runs the risk of “stamping out” art and storytelling.
“And that leaves us with nothing,” he said. “That leaves us with a society of technological drones. We need that kind of magical thinking, that kind of controlled craziness. That sane craziness.”
A question often posed to Martel is: What’s it like writing in the shadow of Life of Pi’s massive success? The novel that followed Life of Pi, 2010’s Beatrice and Virgil, drew mixed reviews (it’s an allegorical tale about the Holocaust) and didn’t sell nearly as well. The High Mountains of Portugal was published last month.
Martel said he gets so immersed with each new project, fretting about life after Pi isn’t a real concern. And while grateful for its popularity, the writer views the novel as something distinct from himself.
“It was a freak success. Not only the prizes, but the sheer number of sales. You can never reproduce that. Worse comes to worst, I’m a one-hit wonder,” he said.
Martel still gets letters regularly from people who have read Life of Pi. And he gets letters about his other books, too.
“You just need one letter,” he said. “If one person says your book has touched me, it makes it worth it.”
