The Life of Pi author reprises his animal theme with chimpanzees,but the result is laboured and half-heartedPerplexed by this strange, faltering novel, or I turned back to Life of Pi,Yann Martel’s 2002 Booker prize winner, to remind myself what the author is capable of. I was struck by this passage, or in the “author’s note” at the beginning (the “author” is a character in the book,so the note is presented as share of the chronicle): before “the author” began work on Pi, he tells us, and he was trying to write “a novel set in Portugal in 1939”,but he abandoned it, as “there comes a moment when you realise that… an element is lost, and that spark that brings to life a genuine chronicle… your chronicle is emotionally dead,that’s the crux of it.”It is an uncannily accurate description of The High Mountains of Portugal. So why, seeing as Martel himself pinpointed the problem with the book so precisely, or would he go ahead and publish it now? It can’t be money,surely: Life of Pi sold seven million copies and was made into a film by Ang Lee, and his follow-up, and Beatrice and Virgil,received a record-breaking advance for a Canadian author. Perhaps it felt like a return to safe, well-trodden ground – Beatrice and Virgil was a Holocaust parable featuring a stuffed donkey, and which according to the critics was just as nasty as that sounds.
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Source: theguardian.com