The Booker is much to blame. Yann Martel was almost entirely unknown as a writer when, in 2002, he won the prize for Life of Pi, the story of an Indian boy castaway in a boat for 227 days with a big Bengal tiger for company, an allegory of the hazardous odyssey of the soul.
Shortly after his victory, Martel said: “I feel like Jesus Christ after he’s done his three days in Hell, I feel like a boy who has just discovered the joys of self-abuse, I feel like Sir Edmund Hillary after he’s stumbled to the top of Everest, all three joys all at once.” Justifiably, perhaps. For Life of Pi went on to sell 15 million copies in 50 languages and to be filmed in 3D by Ang Lee — the movie took $609 million at the box office. No other author’s fortunes have been so transformed by a prize.
Martel’s subsequent career has been less brilliant. His proposal for a follow-up, a flip book about the Holocaust, one half to be an absurdist play about a monkey and a donkey’s sufferings in the “Horrors”, the other half to be an essay arguing for more imaginative representations of the Holocaust, was rejected by his American publishers. The book he went on to publish in 2010, Beatrice and Virgil — Beatrice being the donkey, Virgil a howler monkey, both stuffed by a Nazi taxidermist — was extraordinarily crass. Reviewing it in these pages I wondered if Martel was just not very bright.
An epically pale imitation
His next novel, The High Mountains of Portugal of 2016, makes a chimpanzee into a Christ-like figure in three different epochs, on an antique crucifix in 1904, inside a corpse in 1938, and as a companion to a Canadian lawyer with heart disease in 1981. Or so I understand, having resisted this treat.
Now, 10 years later, here comes Martel again. Son of Nobody is not quite a flip book but it adopts a gamesome format, the top half of the pages offering a pastiche Homeric epic poem, retelling the events of the Trojan War from the point of view of a lowly foot-soldier called “Psoas of Midea”, the bottom half consisting of the autobiographical annotations of the poem’s supposed discoverer and translator, a Canadian classicist, Harlowe Donne. So this is a mediocre imitation of Vladimir Nabokov’s masterpiece Pale Fire of 1962, in which a 999-line poem by the fictional poet John Shade is commented upon by his increasingly demented academic colleague, Charles Kinbote.
Harlowe Donne’s story, though, is nothing like as entertaining as Kinbote’s fantasies. What we learn though his footnotes is that he has taken a year’s scholarship to Oxford University to work as an assistant on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, leaving behind his disaffected wife, Gail, who works in marketing, and their little daughter, Helen (inevitably). While he is away, Helen dies suddenly of influenza but Donne is so preoccupied with his pseudo-Homeric discovery, he doesn’t come back for the funeral for nine weeks. That’s it. The poem he pieces together, or more likely invents, from the tiny fragments of papyrus is no more enticing. The excitement of reading Homer is that you are directly in touch with an archaic world, even through translation. This pastiche, “The Psoad”, daftly attempting to re-imagine The Iliad from a more humble perspective than that of the gods and heroes, is codswallop and therefore boring. Ditto the officiously informative annotations. (To read rewardingly about the Homeric world do try Adam Nicolson’s The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters.)
The animal instinct
Although this time, at least, Martel’s tale is about people, he can’t resist his animal flourishes once again, randomly introducing camels, giraffes, elephants, wildebeest, porcupines and chameleons into the poem and notes. And, to be sure, we’re told that The Psoad is spiritual like the Gospels (“Troy: Jerusalem; Psoas: Jesus”) too.
So: high concept, low achievement. “I might have been left to my ways if it hadn’t been for the bizarre success of Life of Pi,” Martel once said. Now there’s an alternative world that’s a truly dreamy prospect.
