Book Summary | Life of Pi

The GIST

Life of Pi by Yann Martel is a novel about a boy, a tiger and a lifeboat, and about the stories people tell in order to go on living. Its hero, Piscine Molitor Patel, known as Pi, is a sixteen-year-old from Pondicherry, India, who survives the sinking of a cargo ship and spends 227 days adrift on the Pacific Ocean in the company of a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. It reads like an adventure story. Underneath, it is a long and quietly mischievous argument about faith, truth and which version of events we choose to believe.

Martel, a Canadian writer born in Spain to diplomat parents, has said he wrote it at a lonely time, when he was looking for a story that would give direction to his life. At least five London publishers turned the manuscript down before Knopf Canada brought it out in September 2001. It won the Man Booker Prize the following year and has since sold more than ten million copies. Ang Lee's 2012 film version won four Academy Awards, and a stage adaptation won five Olivier Awards in London. Barack Obama wrote to Martel to call the book "an elegant proof of God, and the power of storytelling." Martel himself boils it down to three sentences: "Life is a story"; "You can choose your story"; "A story with God is the better story."

The Story

A frame around the picture

The book begins with an author's note, and the note is part of the fiction. A writer in search of material explains how he came across a remarkable story and the man who lived it. From the first page, then, Martel has us wondering what is fact and what is invention, which is exactly the frame of mind he wants. The story proper is told by Pi himself in middle age, living in Canada with a wife and family, and looking back.

Pondicherry: a zoo and three religions

Pi grows up in the 1960s and 1970s as the younger son of the man who runs the Pondicherry Zoo. Animals are his everyday surroundings, and he has decided opinions about them. He defends zoos against those who think of them as prisons, arguing that animals are creatures of habit and territory who take captivity far more calmly than their defenders suppose.

His name needs explaining. He was called Piscine Molitor after a swimming pool in Paris, although neither of his parents was much of a swimmer. At school the other children gleefully turn "Piscine" into "Pissing." So when he moves up to secondary school, he takes matters into his own hands and introduces himself to every class as Pi, after the number that expresses the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, a number that goes on forever.

Names keep playing tricks in this book. The tiger at the zoo was caught as a cub by a hunter called Richard Parker, who named the animal Thirsty for the eager way it drank at a river. A clerk mixed up the paperwork, the cub was entered as Richard Parker, and Pi's father found the mistake so funny that the name stuck.

Pi's father, a practical and sometimes stern man who trusts reason, wants his sons to hold no sentimental ideas about what lives behind the bars. One day he gives Pi and his older brother Ravi a lesson they never forget. He makes them watch a goat being fed to a tiger, then walks them from enclosure to enclosure explaining precisely how each animal could hurt them. An animal remains an animal, he insists, however tame it looks.

Pi's other education is spiritual. He is raised a Hindu and a vegetarian. At fourteen he discovers Christianity, and then Islam, and sees no reason to choose. He practices all three at once, to the dismay of his parents and the exasperation of his three religious teachers, each of whom assumed the boy was his alone. Pi's explanation is disarming: he "just wants to love God." His mother, the gentler of his parents, makes room for his curiosity.

Then history steps in. In the mid-1970s, with India under the state of emergency declared by Indira Gandhi, Pi's father decides to sell the zoo and move the family to Canada. Many of the animals are sold to zoos abroad, and those bound for North America will travel with the family on a Japanese freighter, the Tsimtsum.

The sinking

In the summer of 1977, a few days out of Manila, Pi wakes in the night and leaves his cabin to see what is going on. That curiosity saves him. The ship is going down fast in heavy weather. Crewmen throw him into a lifeboat, and within minutes the Tsimtsum is gone, and so is everyone and everything he knows. The novel gives no reason for the disaster. There is only the gap where his life used to be.

He is not alone in the boat. A zebra with a broken leg has ended up there, along with a spotted hyena, and soon an orangutan from the zoo named Orange Juice floats up to join them. Hidden under the tarpaulin, having been helped aboard in the confusion by Pi himself, is Richard Parker. Over the first terrible days the animals do what animals do, and the lifeboat's population shrinks until only two are left: a vegetarian teenage boy and an adult Bengal tiger, on twenty-odd feet of boat in the middle of the largest ocean on earth.

Boy and tiger

Pi's first move is to get away. He lashes oars and life jackets into a small raft, ties it to the lifeboat by a rope, and retreats to it. But the supplies are on the boat, and he cannot float behind it forever. He comes to understand that he has only two real options, to act or to die, and that the tiger cannot be killed or escaped. It must be managed.

So he puts to use everything his father and the zoo taught him. Using a whistle, the rocking of the boat and the tiger's own seasickness as tools, and food and fresh water as rewards, he sets out to teach Richard Parker that Pi is the dominant animal aboard and that part of the boat is Pi's territory. He does not make a pet of him. Martel never softens the tiger into a friend. Richard Parker stays a predator, and the best Pi can hope for is to make him predictable.

The days become a routine of survival. The lifelong vegetarian learns to fish and to kill, to collect rainwater, to ration, and to endure sun, storms and illness. Alongside the work of staying alive runs the work of staying human. Pi prays. He argues with God, thanks him, and at times nearly gives up on him, and each time he comes back to faith, because without some meaning he would not have the strength to lift his arm. He also comes to see that the tiger, for all its menace, is keeping him alive. Fear of Richard Parker keeps him alert and disciplined; caring for him gives each day a purpose. Without the tiger he would have surrendered to despair.

The Pacific is drawn as both magnificent and wholly indifferent. As the weeks turn into months, the line between what Pi sees and what is real begins to waver. At his lowest ebb he goes temporarily blind from exposure, and in that state he meets another castaway drifting in another boat, an encounter that offers hope and delivers something else. Later the lifeboat fetches up on a floating island of algae, crowded with hundreds of thousands of meerkats, with fresh water and food for the taking. Boy and tiger both recover their strength there. It looks like paradise, until Pi discovers what the island does at night.

Two men with a tape recorder

We know from the beginning that Pi lives to tell the tale. What we do not know is how the voyage ends, what becomes of Richard Parker, and what happens when two officials from the Japanese Ministry of Transport arrive to question the sole survivor about why their ship sank. That conversation is the last part of the novel. It is short and often funny, and it changes the meaning of everything that came before. It should be read, not summarized.

What It's Really About

Belief. Pi's three religions are no joke to him. They are three languages for speaking to the same mystery, and the lifeboat tests whether any of them holds. One reviewer who describes herself as not at all religious admired how gently the book handles Hinduism, Christianity and Islam, without preaching. Another critic names its two great themes as the interdependence of all life and the idea that we live and breathe by belief.

Stories and truth. From the invented author's note onward, the novel keeps asking how we know what is true, and whether the truest account of an experience is always the most literal one. It suggests that stories are how a mind gives shape to things that would otherwise destroy it. Readers finish the book arguing, and most say the argument tells them something about themselves.

Survival and the animal within. Many readers take Richard Parker as a picture of Pi's own will to live, the fierce part of him that will do whatever staying alive requires. Others take him simply as a tiger. The book supports both readings, and the relationship between the two of them, somewhere between terror and companionship, is its heart.

Nature without sentiment. Pi's father was right. The sea and its creatures are beautiful and they do not care. Nature in this novel explains nothing and promises nothing.

There is a curious story behind the tiger's name. Martel borrowed it from literature and history: a Richard Parker is a doomed sailor in a sea novel by Edgar Allan Poe, and the name belonged to real shipwreck victims as well. "So many victimized Richard Parkers had to mean something," Martel said. The premise of a boy at sea with a big cat was sparked by a review of Max and the Cats, a novella by the Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar, whom Martel thanks in his note "for the spark of life."

Readers love the book for the sheer nerve of its premise, for Pi's warm, curious voice, and for an ending that sends them straight back to the beginning. Maclean's called it a "head-scratching combination of dense religious allegory, zoological lore and enthralling adventure tale, written with warmth and grace." Common complaints are that the first hundred pages take their time, that Martel sometimes pushes his message too hard, and that the ending withholds the firm answer some readers want.

Who Should Read It

Readers who like an adventure with something to chew on afterward: fans of survival stories, of animals written without sentimentality, and of novels that argue with you. Book clubs do very well with it, because the ending divides a room. If you want nonstop action from the first page, be patient with the opening section in India; everything in it comes back at sea. It suits thoughtful teenagers as well as adults, though some of the survival scenes are intense.