It is true that the follow-up to Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi features animals. We may acknowledge that the titles characters of Beatrice and Virgil are a donkey and a howler monkey, respectively, and let us move on. This is a book that deserves to be taken on its own merit, without being tied to a work of the past.
The reader is nearly 60 pages into the novel before meeting the elderly taxidermist mentioned on the dust jacket of the book. Up to that point, the reader has followed a man named Henry, a Canadian writer whose latest venture, a flip book with a novel on one side and a critical essay on the other, has been shot down by editors, booksellers and historians with such force that he decides to give up on his craft all together. This work was to be Henry’s finest. Previously, a wildly popular novel had supplied Henry with a certain amount of notoriety. Written under a pen name, Henry’s novel had been a best seller and sold to Hollywood.
The failure of his would-be greatest work still fresh on his mind, Henry and his wife move to an unnamed foreign city where he takes up acting and the clarinet. He has all but set down his pen forever when he receives a mysterious packet in the mail. This packet includes one scene from a play, a short story by Flaubert and a note, asking Henry for his help.
Henry is intrigued and eventually sets out to find the author of this note (and presumably the author of the scene which describes, in more detail than anyone may think possible, the smell, taste and texture of a pear. It’s actually rather incredible).
Henry finds the author of the scene to be the elderly taxidermist (also named Henry), and the two characters in the play to be two of his finest pieces, a donkey named Beatrice and a howler monkey named Virgil, both of whom make their permanent homes in his back office.
Though he has given up his pen in favor of other passions, Henry agrees to help the taxidermist with his play, which appears to revolve only around the two animals in conversation with one another. Henry and the taxidermist work together over a period of many months, though Henry is never quite sure of the goal and he is even less sure of why he stays.
In just over 200 pages, Martel’s content is so full and so rich that a reader’s brain will be completely saturated with it for weeks after closing the back cover. Mark Twain wrote that “The difference between the almost right word & the right word is… the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” Martel’s latest novel is one lightning strike after another. Ten million fireflies cannot come close to shining light on his prose.
Henry wrestles with a problem that most likely challenged Martel as well—in hundreds of thousands of pages written on the Holocaust, there has been very little strictly artistic representation. Beatrice and Virgil serves as an effective vehicle for Martel to try his hand at an allegorical representation.
Beatrice and Virgil are not stereotypical talking animals. They are not cartoons. They are not Disney. They are multi-dimensional, living, breathing, caring individuals with a deep connection to one another. They are so well-developed in the brief time that we spend with them that their scenes scattered throughout the novel are almost more real than the time Henry spends in his own home.
The novel’s final action comes about so quickly and with such force that the reader is literally breathless, literally left without air. Martel makes use of every word, every letter on the page, and the result is nothing short of spectacular.
It has been eight years since the publication of Life of Pi. In that time, we have not heard much from Yann Martel, but this compact, power-packed novel is well-worth the wait. And if it is another eight years before he publishes again, I will be waiting eagerly to turn every page.
Beatrice and Virgil
By Yann Martel
224 pp. Spiegel & Grau $24.00
Related posts:
- Artistic or King-Kong revisited?
- With “One power, Two powers, Red Power, Blue Power:” where does NATO go?
- The cooking challenge: Flinn takes on the ordinary
- McSweeney’s author Cotter shows depth with dark first novel
- The Foreigners offers multiple viewpoints of Argentina
