Spoilers ahead! Look out!
For many people, Life of Pi is a book that they’d want to forget and reread again for the first time over and over again. Apparently the Booker Prize judges agreed and the book was showered with accolades even to this day, and I’d say that it deserves the success. Even for those who don’t really read, they’d be somewhat familiar with the story of Life of Pi, much of it thanks to Ang Lee’s 2012 movie adaptation of the book. When Beatrice and Virgil was published in 2010, it barely made a noise. So what happened?
I picked up the book randomly, as I always do from a secondhand seller in Shopee. I really liked Life of Pi for its allegorical storytelling, the muddling between reality and fiction in stories, the life and death stakes of its characters — humans or animals alike. We had a sympathetic narrator who’s learning asserting himself between life and death. I can understand why millions of people fell to the charms of the book. Hey, I fell for it too. However, these essential elements are missing in Beatrice and Virgil.
The narrator is a failed author who decided to move to Berlin with his wife and started to work in a chocolateria just because. In his spare time he performs with his drama club, still hiding his identity as a famous author. This in itself, is not really an issue, but I always ask if I want to hang out with the protagonist of the novel over a beer, and I’m not so sure about old mate Henry. He stinks of privilege. I actually enjoyed when he was chewed over his new book by his peers and publishers. Was it something that hit close to home for Martel?
For a while Henry does not publish books, but he keeps receiving fan mails from all around, including one from Berlin, his adopted city. The mail was nothing but excerpts of an obscure Flaubert story, and what we can guess as a start of a play between Beatrice and Virgil. The story is violent, with gratuitous murder of animals, emphasised by a highlighter. Henry was resolute to deliver the respond to the mail himself. He was in for a bit of a surprise when the sender of a letter is an aged taxidermist who doesn’t have much in the way of social skills. He had asked for help for his play — to find the words, and to describe the back story of Beatrice and Virgil, who we find out are a donkey and a monkey frozen in taxidermy.
The taxidermist, also named Henry, prefers to read his play out loud than to give to Henry the writer to read. Quickly enough, we find that the play is an allegory for the holocaust. Virgil the monkey is an outcast, found by the side of the river by Beatrice the donkey. It is from this point that they started the discourse about pears, which I found delightful. Beatrice, who had never seen or tasted a pear, had to rely on Virgil for the description of a pear — and this is perhaps the best part of the book. The book is about storytelling, and a discourse between facts and fiction. Can writers describe events accurate enough that the reader may understand? In the end, Virgil, though valiantly described the pear in poetic detail, failed to describe the essence of it — the taste of the pear.
The rest of the book is a fucking mess though. I think it is just too many things at the same time which sometimes hit but rarely complement each other. The story of Henry the writer barely resonates with the play of Beatrice and Virgil. When we find out that the taxidermist was a former Nazi sympathiser, I don’t know what to make out the character at all. Was he writing the play out of guilt and the search for redemption? That only through finding the words for the play that he is able to redeem himself? I don’t know.
The ambition for Beatrice and Virgil seems larger than its predecessor Life of Pi, however it falls largely flat. I thought for the first third of the book, the writing was beautiful. I could get used to the discourse on the purpose of writing, and Henry wrestling with the idea of a flipbook, where one side is non-fiction essays and the other side a novel. Tackling themes such as the holocaust is not an easy feat, and Martel raised a fair point through the narrator that there rarely had been fictionalised accounts of the holocaust presented in a novel way. This book is an attempt of that, and maybe it should have been left well alone.
