TORONTO — Life of Pi fans have a new set of animals to fall for, this time a donkey and a monkey that don’t bite but may tear readers’ hearts out.
Nearly eight years after his boy-animal shipwreck tale Life of Pi won the Man Booker Prize for fiction, Canadian author Yann Martel on Tuesday released his next novel, Beatrice & Virgil, a wrenching Holocaust allegory featuring the titular furry characters.
“It’s not a book for survivors and not necessarily a book for their immediate descendants, perhaps, who have it in their family history,” the Saskatoon-based author told The Canadian Press in an interview.
“But it’s for the others. It’s for people like me. I’m not Jewish, nor am I of German or Polish or Hungarian or eastern European descent — I’m originally French but 300 years ago — so I’m a complete outsider and yet the Holocaust involves me.
“It’s not just a Jewish drama, it’s a human drama.”
Martel’s third novel begins with his protagonist, a Canadian writer, trying to publish a book about the Holocaust. That book happens to be the followup to the smash success of the character’s second novel.
The writer wants to bind an essay and a novel on the subject in one volume. But after facing resistance from his editors, he abandons the project and moves abroad to explore other interests.
Enter a brusque, brooding taxidermist who is writing a play about Beatrice the donkey and Virgil the howler monkey, and wants the author’s help.
As the author becomes engrossed in the dark world of the taxidermist, he realizes the play has a Holocaust theme and the two animals represent the victims.
“The novel is not so much about the Holocaust as it is about representations, how we can talk about it,” said Martel, 46. “To me, the emotional core of the novel is the dialogue between Beatrice and Virgil, these snippets of plays we get, and the intellectual core would be the very end.”
The Spanish-born Martel said the idea for Beatrice & Virgil came to him around 2001, when the faith-themed Life of Pi was published to international acclaim (it won the Booker in 2002 and is now being adapted for the big screen by Ang Lee).
Martel’s hope was to write about the Holocaust without being typically literal or factual about it.
“Why do we not allow ourselves to approach the Holocaust with our imaginations? Why do we do it necessarily with that factual, literal part of ourselves?” he said. “Now, you need that, in part, to know what happened, but once you know what happened, why don’t we play with it the way war is played with?”
But the creative process was stunted for several years. Martel was busy with the Booker win, he published another book called What Is Stephen Harper Reading? and he saw the birth of his son, Theo, now 8 1/2 months old.
Then there was the difficulty of tackling an event of such magnitude and complexity.
Martel travelled three times to Auschwitz in Poland and once to the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel to get to the essence of the horrors. From those experiences, he wrote a play and then a lengthy essay, but as in Beatrice & Virgil his editors shunned the idea of publishing them together.
In March 2009, he rewrote the whole project, incorporating the play into a novel with the added layer of the taxidermist and the author. He used animals, as he did with Life of Pi, because readers tend to be “less cynical” about them than they are about humans, he said.
Overall, the writing process was “torturous” and “artistically challenging,” he admitted.
“Life of Pi, I always felt in control. I knew what I wanted to do, I knew what my thought was ... It was very clear. This one, I was less in control,” said Martel.
“At one point I just said, ‘OK, stop over-thinking it, just follow your intuition.’ So in some ways it’s a more instinctive novel than Life of Pi.”
Clearly, there’s a veneer of autobiography in the book, with the central character’s creative struggles mirroring Martel’s.
The intention, said Martel, was to explain how “the Holocaust tends to silence everyone.”
“That’s what everyone says: it’s unnameable, it’s unspeakable, it has this aura of shutting you up, and so I chose this writer who was shut up by the Holocaust but still wants to struggle through it and come to some sort of expression.”
Now that Beatrice & Virgil is out, Martel said he isn’t feeling pressure to match the success of Life of Pi, which has sold seven million copies worldwide and netted fans including U.S. President Barack Obama, who recently sent him a handwritten note praising the novel.
In fact, Martel already has his sights set on his next novel, which will also include animals: three chimpanzees in Portugal. He hopes to start working on it this fall.
“It’s about teachers, it’s about the role of gurus and what happens to the disciples once the guru dies, and my theory is the disciples go crazy,” he said.
Martel also hopes to one day publish the Holocaust essay he wrote before Beatrice & Virgil came together.
“But right now we have the novel and the idea of not publishing them together was that the essay would somehow limit how people would read the novel, because the essay is very much about the Holocaust and its representations,” he said.
“My publishers thought that if you append that with the novel, people will necessarily read the novel as a Holocaust novel, and you don’t want to limit how people read a work of fiction — you want readers to bring freedom to their reading and interpret how they want.”