In the spirit of Life of Pi, let me begin this review with a story.
It was June of 2017, and I was on a Qatar Airways flight bound for Southeast Asia. I was a senior in college and had accepted a six-month internship with a missionary organization there. Seated next to me was a Muslim woman from Kenya. During the flight, she pulled out her paperback copy of the Quran and began trying to convert me to Islam. The tactic was a familiar one; as an American Christian, I was well-versed in the delicate art of airplane evangelism. In the unlikely event that the plane crashed, each of us believed that the other’s soul was bound for perdition. Thus, the stakes were high. I listened attentively to her case, fumbling over the words of the shahadah (confession of faith) that she urged me to repeat: There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet. “There,” she said with a smile. “Now you are a Muslim!”
Besides my unwitting conversion to Islam, this interaction was memorable for several reasons. I was going to live with Muslims for the next half-year, but I’d never met one before. Most of what I’d heard about Muslims from fellow evangelicals and American news media was negative, but this woman was funny and kind. I was also amazed by how many of the woman’s stories I knew: tales of Adam and Eve, Noah, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, and Jesus. When she’d finished talking, I made an effort to explain the Christian gospel to her, but I couldn’t shake my surprise at how much we held in common.
The missionary organization that I worked with had a retreat center – a small building where team members rested once a week. We were living in a metropolitan slum, laboring alongside impoverished trash-pickers, and time away from these harsh realities was welcome. It was at this building one afternoon that I found a small copy of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. I recalled watching Ang Lee’s movie adaptation in high school and remembered feeling simultaneously awed and unsettled. Pi, the film’s shipwrecked protagonist, practiced an idiosyncratic blend of Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. I’d come to Southeast Asia to share Jesus with non-Christians, so I wasn’t keen to revisit Pi’s strange, salad-bowl spirituality. I did crack open the novel, though, and encountered one of the most beautiful descriptions of the suffering Christ I’d ever read. As far as I knew, Martel wasn’t a Christian, so how could he write about Christ this way?
Looking back on that time, I can see that I wasn’t ready for Life of Pi. I had chosen to live in a slum because I wanted to help suffering people, but I also hoped to change their minds; I wasn’t looking to have my own worldview changed. Over the next six months, as I shared the joys and hardships of slum life with my Muslim neighbors, observed their religious rituals, and listened to their stories, my faith was challenged and altered in unexpected ways. Again and again, like the enormous, ever-shifting ocean that sweeps Pi and his tiger companion along, life burst the ideological boundaries I’d constructed for it.
Many Christians, including myself, took issue with Life of Pi because we believed it encouraged religious syncretism: “All faiths are the same!” That isn’t the case. Pi’s bizarre form of faith isn’t prescriptive; it’s an expression of a personality marked by irrepressible curiosity, wonder, and lust for life – what G.K. Chesterton called “a sense of eccentric privilege.” Life of Pi is, first and foremost, an invitation to broaden our view of the world – to open ourselves up to mystery and to glimpse, as Pi does, life in all its vivid, savage, indescribable glory.
On its surface, the book shouldn’t work. A first-person account from an Indian boy that’s told by a white Canadian, a coming-of-age tale that’s also a seafaring survival epic, a story within a story that mingles theology with psychological and zoological analysis? Come on. Like the writer whose interview notes are scattered throughout the novel, you might be tempted to dismiss Pi’s story as an impossibility, until you hear it. Not since Moby Dick have I encountered a novel that spans genres and topics so delightfully. Like Melville’s masterpiece, Life of Pi ponders the diverse life-forms that share our watery planet. It also explores the stories we tell (religious and otherwise) to make sense of life’s complexity and uncertainty. And like Melville’s prose, Martel’s narration sparkles with a heaping dose of open-hearted humor.
One of the marks of Life of Pi‘s greatness is the amount of discussion it has generated since its publication. What do we make of that mysterious island? How do we interpret that haunting, wondrous, befuddling ending? What can we believe, or should we believe, about Pi’s story? After digging into some analysis of the story’s themes, motifs, and allusions, I can tell you that this novel rewards contemplation (the names of characters, animals, places, and boats offer a particularly fascinating rabbit hole).
Near the beginning of the book, Martel’s stand-in writer hears that Pi’s story will make him believe in God. Life of Pi is a thoughtful interrogation of faith and a beautiful argument for it. I’ve abandoned the religion that I once carried to Southeast Asia. Pi’s shipwreck may have strengthened his belief in God, but my recent crisis of faith led me to atheism. I still mourn the loss of my religious heritage and convictions. Yet, as I navigate the aftermath of that storm, grasping for what flotsam I can, I find Martel’s eccentric, wide-eyed protagonist to be a kindred spirit. We might disagree on a host of topics, but I know that Pi would hear my story with a twinkle in his eye (at the very least, he’d be grateful that I don’t call myself an agnostic!), and I think he’d respond with something like this quote from Frederick Buechner: “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
Now I need to revisit that movie adaptation again.
Words for Wayfarers 