Awards Season: Life of Pi – Yann Martel

Its on-screen adaptation has taken the world of cinema by stormy, with 11 award nominations under its belt already, reviewer Freya Godfrey takes a look at the book behind the film: Martel’s Booker Prize winning “Life of Pi”. This is a tale of cinematic beauty, magical surrealism, and a questioning of faith and belief by a young boy, and a tiger.

Life of Pi was originally recommended to me by my maths teacher. Due to this, the mathematical symbol  in the title and the fact that it has exactly 100 chapters, I anticipated an intellectually stimulating but ultimately boring read. Stimulating it may be, but it could never be called dull. Yann Martel fills his unique novel with spectacular imagery and extraordinary events to create his captivating depiction of a boy’s struggle for survival.

The novel follows the story of Piscine Patel, nicknamed Pi; a sixteen year old Indian boy brought up on his parents’ zoo in India. Deciding to sell their zoo and emigrate to Canada, Pi’s family and a selection of their animals board a cargo ship. When their freighter gets stuck in a storm and capsizes, the animals escape from their enclosures, leading to a wonderfully chaotic scene in which the beasts slip and stumble around the ship. Amazingly, Pi is able to escape in a small lifeboat, but it is not the refuge he hopes for: also finding shelter is a spotted hyena, a zebra, an orang-utan and, most worryingly, a Bengal tiger. Pi must provide for the tiger, named Richard Parker, whilst protecting his own life. Stranded in the Pacific ocean for 227 days, Pi has to rely on his raw survival instincts to stay alive.

The storyline may seem utterly unbelievable, but it is this magical realism that makes the novel so exciting. Yann Martel weaves surreal elements with a realistic, matter-of-fact style of narrative that enables him to give the events that he describes a plausible life. I even found myself accepting the descriptions of a carnivorous algae-covered island, which is inhabited by meerkats. The sense of survival, the human capacity to adapt and persevere, and Pi’s strong sense of spirituality, is what drives this novel. In the early chapters, we find out that Pi does not conform, traditionally, to one religion. The region in which he lives is a hybrid of Christian, Hindu and Muslim faiths: Pi finds himself identifying with all three. Through Pi’s journey, Martel questions the nature of religion and spirituality and blurs the line between reality, belief and fantasy in his truly inventive story.

Although for some Life of Pi could be a little too surreal, the beautiful images it conjures and the author’s focus on faith in humanity’s capacity to endure make it one of the most imaginative and inspiring novels I have ever read

Click here to read Exeposé Screen’s review of the Life of Pi film.

Review by Freya Godfrey
Ed. by Georgina Holland – Exeposé Online Books Editor

Review: Life of Pi

Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which won the Booker Prize in 2001, has an eye catching and appealingly unique premise. My copy of the book has a short, simple blurb that begins with the tagline, “One boy, One boat, One tiger”. This is the story in a nutshell; what happens when a teenage boy and a tiger are forced to share a lifeboat after a devastating shipwreck, and how on earth does the boy survive? When plans were set in motion to adapt Martel’s novel for the big screen many questioned whether this strikingly strange scenario was filmable.

Photo credits to 20th Century Fox

How many times have we been told that a book cannot survive the transformation into a movie? Yet sometimes the best adaptations are those that seem impossible, because the filmmakers are forced to be as creative as the original author to make the essence of the source material work on screen. Ang Lee’s interpretation of Life of Pi marries the best of the visual and the written word, and in my view can truly be counted as a great adaptation.

Most critics have praised the stunning aesthetics of the film. Lee and his team succeed in bringing to life Indian streets, a zoo, the vast Pacific Ocean and modern day Canada in an at once vivid, realistic and evocative style. Life of Pi is also that rare thing, a 3D film that actually makes effective use of the technology. Sprawling storms, which seem like works of art in themselves, throw froth and rain in your face. The underwater world bubbles and brims with colourful life. Waves lap and crash in lifelike ways, horizons shift and glow in the setting sun. Most importantly of all, animals look, sound and feel alive. When they move they seem like wild, unpredictable creatures rather than computer generated pixels. Some of the footage from the trailers made the animals look like artificial, CGI creations and it is a tremendous relief that in the film itself they are believable. If they were not, Life of Pi’s narrative centre would lose all of its force.

But before the meat of Life of Pi’s key premise, we are introduced to our protagonist, Piscine, or Pi, as he makes himself known. The details of his early life are quirky and interesting, even without his extraordinary adventure at sea. Lee takes a bit of time setting things up, just as Martel does in the book. Rafe Spall plays an unnamed writer, listening to an adult Pi as he tells his story. Irrfan Khan plays the grown up Pi and the first chunk of the film consists of nostalgic flashbacks, with Khan’s voiceover draped over the top. Many films that indulge in voiceover are lazy, awful affairs that can be painful to watch. However, Life of Pi mostly maintains the balance perfectly. The conversation between Spall and Khan simply stirs our curiosity, and rarely outstays its welcome. The narration is also a nice nod to the novel and makes sense given the nostalgia of the piece.  Khan’s voiceover also disappears once Pi is stranded alone at sea.

As everyone knows by now, Pi is not left entirely alone with his self pity. He makes it across the Pacific in the company of Richard Parker, the tiger from his father’s zoo. This section of the film, with Pi isolated and no other human characters to interact with, could have dragged, especially without the existential introspection of the novel. However, my interest rarely waned. Lee conjures a powerfully primal confrontation between Pi and Richard Parker, a confrontation that morphs into an odd form of companionship. He sets it all against a backdrop that is beautiful, bleak and overwhelming. You feel Pi’s fear initially (I physically recoiled when the tiger first leapt out of the screen in all its 3D glory) and admire his compassion and reason, as he realises Richard Parker might just save his life. Pi questions his spirituality and everything about his life; he hallucinates and dreams. Of course the novel had the time to go into more detail, but nothing here feels significantly incomplete.

The ending has proved divisive, as endings often are. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian is needlessly harsh with his two-star rating of the film because he found the ending “exasperating”. I may be a mere apprentice compared to Bradshaw but he has undoubtedly missed the point. I do not wish to spoil the ending so I will simply say that it is intentionally frustrating and is clearly designed to provoke questions and debate. It highlights the power of storytelling and examines the nature and value of truth. Indeed, Life of Pi is a film with many intelligent themes, from spirituality to inter-species relations. It is also laced with fun, nostalgia and warmth. In fact, name an emotion you can experience at the cinema and Life of Pi probably covers it at some point.

For these reasons, Life of Pi is a film that you can mull over quietly by yourself or debate passionately with friends. It is a varied and unique cinematic experience, expertly told, that I would highly recommend seeing before the hustle and bustle of campus takes hold again in 2013.

My Rating: 4/5 stars

Rotten Tomatoes Critics’ Average: 4/5 stars

Liam Trim, Screen Editor

You can read a review of the original novel, courtesy of Exeposé Books, here.