‘How much of my soul will it carve out?’: Life of Pi author Yann Martel on work-life balance
By his own admission, Yann Martel is not a prolific writer. It has been 10 years since the Canadian author of the global bestseller Life of Pi published his last book, but life, he says, is all about balance.
“I’ve been extraordinarily lucky,” the 62-year-old says on a video call from his home in Saskatoon, a city in the Saskatchewan province. “I write these odd books and certainly in the case of Life of Pi they’ve managed to strike a chord. I’m grateful for that. So work is an important part of life, but at some point you have to ask yourself how much of my soul will it carve out?”
Martel has to balance writing with family, the four children aged 10, 12, 14 and 16, he shares with his wife, the British writer Alice Kuipers. When he needs to work, he retreats to a small cabin behind the family home. Standing at a treadmill desk he strolls at 1.3 miles per hour (2.1km/h) as he conjures up stories often described as exemplars of magical realism. “The children don’t intrude by knocking on my door, but there’s always activities to organise,” he says. “Kids are like Russian novels: they’re ever developing, with constant plot twists and characterisation that gets deeper. Kids take time, but I want to take time.” Today, his duties include this interview and supporting his 12-year-old son through his first sleepover party. “He’s quite an anxious kid, so the evening will be taken up by that entirely.”
The fundamental importance of work (a very Hindu concept, he tells me), and the sacrifices it demands, are central concerns in his new novel, Son of Nobody. It’s the tale of a Canadian classicist, Harlow Donne, who is granted a scholarship to study a collection of papyrus fragments at Oxford University. His wife, Gail, and seven-year-old daughter, Helen, are unable to accompany him, so Donne travels to England alone. The scholarship is the opportunity of a lifetime, but at what cost? His marriage is disintegrating and Gail’s parting words are: “don’t come back”. The book’s narrator asks, “In the balance of life, what is the weight of a dream, what is the weight of reality?”
In Oxford, Donne’s high hopes appear justified when he makes a remarkable discovery. While studying at the Bodleian Library, he unearths an account of the Trojan War offering a substantially different view to The Iliad. Unlike the gods and nobles who populate Homer’s epic poem, this is the story of a commoner, a goatherd’s son called Psoas of Midea. Donne names the work The Psoad and dedicates his translation to Helen, his beloved child.
What follows is a dialogue between a contemporary man, his daughter and the Ancient Greeks who lived and died outside the walls of Troy. Donne and Psoas are separated by 2000 years, but Martel uses The Psoad as a kind of literary portal, highlighting their connection as well as universal themes of regret, homesickness, ambition and love. The book’s structure is unusual for a novel. Inspired by an annotated edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Martel devotes the top of each page to Donne’s translation of The Psoad and adds footnotes to comment on everything from Ancient Greek weaponry to his daughter’s love of animals.
He shrugs when I suggest his novel-as-PhD dissertation is a bold idea. “It just seemed the best way to tell the story,” he says. “I didn’t want to root the story in just one time frame, the present, with flashbacks to the past. That would render the past utilitarian. The footnotes were not only metaphorically useful, they allowed me to say a lot by changing gears. At one point in the novel I say ‘we’re all footnotes to a greater story’. Well, that’s entirely true. Our little lives, taken collectively, are everything; they’re the greater life of this planet.”
Martel, a philosophy graduate and the son of academics, has never been afraid of taking chances, of challenging his readers. Ideas are his stock-in-trade; intellectual questing the motor that powers his writing. His books are singular vaults of the imagination that ask probing questions about identity, the subjective nature of truth, the relationship between man and beast and faith.
He believes in God, but does not follow any particular religion. “Why would I not believe that there’s something beyond the material that can’t be accessed through rationality?” he asks. “Systems are self-reinforcing, and if you only ask rational questions, you’ll only get rational answers. If that was the only way to access truth, there would be no religions and no art. I believe in magical thinking that goes beyond the rational. Is a Beethoven symphony true? That’s not the right question. It’s moving and speaks to us of the human experience.” He pauses. “I believe in the divine,” he says, “because I don’t want to limit myself to the methods and output of a computer.”
Faith is central to Life of Pi, the novel that won the 2002 Booker Prize, sold more than 15 million copies and spawned a successful movie and stage play. Who could have imagined that the tale of a 16-year-old Indian boy who practises Hinduism, Christianity and Islam and survives 227 days on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, would entrance so many readers? Martel certainly didn’t. “I was unbelievably surprised that Life of Pi did so well,” he says. “I just write the books I want to write and hope they do well.”
On winning the Booker Prize and his ascension to literature’s top table with only his second novel, he says, “You don’t write to win a prize, but that validation is wonderful. The book was doing well even before [it won], but art is a social contract; the creator creates and the completion of that equation is the reviewer, the reader and the listener. What’s also wonderful is the letters I’ve received. People who have had cancer and named the tumour Richard Parker. Others come up to me at book signings and the conversations are very intimate, very confessional.”
Not all his books have been unequivocal successes. His much-anticipated follow-up to Life of Pi was Beatrice and Virgil, a Holocaust allegory featuring a donkey, a howler monkey and a mysterious taxidermist. The New York Times′ Michiko Kakutani called it a “botched and at times cringe-making fable”. Martel acknowledges his third novel attracted some “terrible, terrible reviews”, but says they were mostly written in America, a country with a “very dogmatic view” of the Holocaust. The real point is this: he is not impervious to awards, sales and reviews, but they won’t distract him from writing the books he wants to write.
So, why The Iliad? Martel began talking about the poem in interviews about 10 years ago. At the time, he’d not long ended a siege of his own, a four-year campaign that saw him send 101 books to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper to promote literature and the arts. The politician’s refusal to engage with the author’s “guerilla book club” might explain why Martel identified the deep sense of anger that pervades The Iliad; the roiling frustration of those who endure a long, seemingly fruitless wait. “The Iliad made me realise that anger is at the heart of Greek mythology,” he says. “The gods are always angry with each other, and they’re angry at mortals. I was astonished that the first book with which the Greeks presented themselves to the world was one that showed them at their worst; completely given over to anger. The West’s first book is essentially an exercise in quasi-nihilism.
“I was also struck how in the same language, Greek, you get the Gospels written a few hundred years later. They strike the complete opposite note: Love, love, love. Yes, you’re still going to be screwed, in this case by the Romans. You’ll be beaten, abused and tortured. Nonetheless [the Gospels suggest] there can still be love.”
The Trojan War was the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory. Troy and its people were obliterated, but the Greeks, the putative victors, gained very little. Ulysses takes 10 years to find his way home while Agamemnon, having sacrificed his daughter’s life in exchange for favourable winds, is murdered by his wife. Without giving too much away, it’s fair to say that Martel finds parallels between the fate of Agamemnon and Donne, a man who can’t abandon his research even when his daughter falls sick.
Martel insists he understands his protagonist’s position. “I see him as a man driven by passion,” he says. “Imagine you’re [British archeologist] Howard Carter, and you’ve discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun. You’d be late for supper that evening presumably. The Psoad becomes something Harlow does for his daughter, and he has to complete the task as an offering to her.”
It’s time for Martel the author to revert to Martel the father. There’s a slumber party to organise. As a parting thought, he says this: “When you create something, it’s fundamentally out of a sense of joy. Art and religion is always about joy. Every novelist, even the Russian nihilists, found joy in creating something. You just wouldn’t do it otherwise,” he says. “To have that joy shared by others is very gratifying, and it’s always a surprise.”
Son of Nobody (Text) is out now. Yann Martel appears at Melbourne Writers Festival (May 7-10) and Sydney Writers’ Festival (May 19-24).
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