10.27.04 - 2:22 p.m.

Last night I finished reading Life of Pi by Yann Martel after watching both Rumsfeld's War on Frontline, and an Independent Lens documentary on the life and political leanings of Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss. Not surprisingly, I have something to say about all of these topics, but I'll concentrate on Life of Pi, which won the Booker Prize in 2002, for the moment. My dad gave me a copy of Life of Pi two years ago at Christmas, but I never managed to read it. It was on my agenda, floating about in my consciousness, in the atmosphere, but I was convinced (for no good reason) that it was going to be a boring book. When I moved - and was sorting books - I found the novel again, and this time pulled it from the slurry of once-read novels and dropped it into the queue. I picked it up again after finishing the Crimson Petal and the White in a furious flurry of reading, still hungover from the unsatisfying (I'm sorry: completely unsatisfying) ending.

...and it took me weeks to get into Life of Pi. Weirdly, I've read reviews by people who loved it, who read it in two sittings, who couldn't put it down. Not me: I struggled with the novel, particularly the first half, which seemed like some B-movie version of a Salman Rushdie or V.S. Naipal novel, with some all-too-clever boy stunning the adults in his life by becoming a Catholic, Muslem, and Hindu. It seemed like such an idealized Western happy-fantasy of the formation of a young man's religious consciousness and his encounters with three of the world's major religions. I suspect any number of soot-footed would-be hippie activists would be happy to claim similar ecumenicalism for their own part. It's not that I disagree with such ecumenicalism - I don't, not at all. My religious views are evolving, but I think I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that - yes - one really can approach the divine through almost any religious tradition, but that there is something important about approaching the divine through a religious tradition rather than through the sort of self-important, solipsistic, made-up "spirituality" that allows people (uh - like me, an old bell book and candle aficionado) to sit out their asses and pretend to be "spiritual" without being religious. In other words: we've read the Cliff Notes, we've decided that you're intolerant and/or boring, and we can get to heaven (or culturally appropriate equivalent) without any of the work. We can feel self-righteous about not being self-righteous. We can pretend to be drawing on our allegedly ancient roots (I'm 1/4 Cherokee, or my wife and I are doing the celtic handfasting thing! or - I believe in faeries, but not angels. That's crazy-talk.) and enhance our identity with mumbo-jumbo that feels cooler than whatever life has handed us.

It's not that I think that there aren't valid critiques of religious institutions. Obviously, there are. But what do you get by standing outside, shilling against the institution, without recognizing the other aspects of the work of faith that challenge and enlighten and enrich and ennoble our society and our existance? Without realizing that faith, that belief, requires work and humility, requires that we challenge ourselves, repeatedly, to be better people. I'm as lazy as they come. Believe me, this is hard work.

Anyway: the whole thing seemed a good old-fashioned, mildly patronizing, center-left fantasy about religious enlightenment and maybe - I don't know - zookeeping wrapped up in an adventure tale. Then, half-way through the novel, the adventure tale started in earnest and I was pretty hooked. I'm always hooked by adventure tales, of course, but I also started to really like Pi, the narrator, as I hadn't early in the novel when he was precious and magickal (tm) and everything we would like to believe about precocious little boys in India - mystical and peculiarly enlightened and whatever the west wishes to assign to such people. He was focused and clear and clever - and with all that set-up, it was easy to identify with him, easy to empathize with him as he finds himself on a lifeboat with a broken-legged zebra, an orang-utan, a hyena, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. What I found even more compelling was the fine tension between the fantastical soft-focus on Pondicherry religious life and the boy taken by all three of the great religions in his town - and the hard, blood and guts reality of the lifeboat - between Pi's own idealized self - vegetarian, kind - and the things to which he is immediately exposed and must, over time, do himself, in order to survive.

Of course, I cringed at the graphic descriptions of the animals' suffering. Honestly, there is nothing I find more disturbing, and - while reading that section - I wondered why I kept on reading. I decided that I wouldn't - that I couldn't - recommend the book to anyone because I found the section so upsetting and even gratuitous. Why is this necessary? - I asked myself, without answer. This wasn't something I wanted to think about. Animal suffering is somehow more horrifying to me - and maybe to many people - than human suffering, or at least the direct, immediate visceral experience of it. At least humans have language to contain some of the horror, some tunnel of future and past, some direction - some hope - beyond the immediate physicality of impending death. Maybe dogs and zebras and mothering orang-utans go to heaven, but I suspect they don't dream of heaven, and that is the essential difference between my immediate, near-physical aversion to even the fictional depiction of animals suffering and my acceptance of similar descriptions of human suffering, at least in the enterprise of fiction. Or that's my current theory.

Anyway, those real, physical, dirty passages about Pi's first days on the lifeboat punctured and punctuated the frothy fantasy that preceded it, and that was to come. Dare I break out that old hippie-electrician-ism, grounding? Or, even better, I could nip into the Latin vault and pull out ye old gravitas. I'm going to back up from this analysis briefly to at least note that, obviously, for me Life of Pi ended well. It was 12:30ish and my house was silent (because I turned off yammering David Letterman to read) and I closed the book and just... sat there, pleasantly, in the quiet, semi-shadows of my living room, with the distant hum of my refridgerator bubbling just below the level of my consciousness, with my hand on the smooth cover of the paperback and some clear consciousness of the spreading silver light from the full moon, the web of stillness outside my little house, the way a changed perspective makes things new, the way the light in my upstairs bedroom window seeps around the edges of the roller blind.

The strange disconnect between the pleasant multiculturalism and silly near-blandness of the opening chapters and the sudden violence - not of the sinking ship, but of the animal world thus revealed - is quite similar to the disconnect at the end of the novel. One is steeped in Pi's story - invested, even, in Pi's story - and then suddenly exposed to (insert what happens at the end, without spoilage). In the second case, I think the effect is even more powerful. It's simple and maybe even easy to leap between the two - to parrot one of the "lessons" one can draw from the ending, but it's exponentially more powerful to be invested, somehow, in the outcome. One of my professors repeatedly made the point that Milton seduces his reader with his extraordinary characterization of the devil in order to indict by association each individual's capacity for sin, sinfulness, shame. The devil has to be a powerful, compelling character in order to make his threat real. I'm now tempted to go off on a tangent about the shameful downward spiral in religious writing in English: from Paradise Lost to those nutty Armageddon novels. How strange: the ambiguous ending here (which so outraged me in my victoriania fetish, The Crimson Petal and the White) is invigorating and compelling. It is precisely what makes Life of Pi a novel worth reading.