The Booker Prize long list was announced today - http://bit.ly/ddGMg1 – much to the literary community’s delight. There’s some great novels on there and I can’t wait to see who makes it through come September. For now though, I’d like to talk about an old Booker Prize winner, Yann Martel. Having just read and reviewed DBC Pierre’s new novel I’ve been inspired to reopen Martel’s latest offer since Life of Pi; Beatrice and Virgil and continue the theme of working out how these writers are getting on post-Booker win.
Ah! I hate to be negative about one of the twenty-first century’s most exciting talents, but I can’t help how I feel. And I feel that Beatrice and Virgil, released back in April, could have been better. For those of you who’ve not gotten around to reading it yet, Beatrice and Virgil are two allegorical animals who feature in a play written by a taxidermist. Henry, an author and the novel’s protagonist, has tasked himself with helping this strange man perfect his play until he learns the truth behind his illusive pupil. (I’m desperately trying not to spoil the plot!)
I think the fact that the novels about struggling to write a novel about what this novels about (complicated, I know), doesn’t do it any favours. Henry’s similarity to the situation Yann was in when writing the book; namely trying and failing to write a novel about the holocaust, makes it seem a little forced. Recently I read an interview with Yann in Canadian paper The Globe and Mail. – http://bit.ly/9cU3S8 – Interestingly he said that he ‘wrote a whole play featuring Beatrice and Virgil, a full two act play, and it just didn’t work… I needed more distance.’ I can understand that if it had have just been a play about Beatrice and Virgil it may have felt sparse in terms of plot yet intense in terms of imagery and meaning. But in the same breath I think that that sounds like a winning combination to me. I mean not a lot really happens in Life of Pi after the shipwreck, and that’s a bloody fantastic piece of writing.
But here’s the thing, and thankfully it’s far from negative, the extracts of play that make up a good chunk of this book are, without mincing words, fucking excellent. They equal or excel anything that Yann has written before and are well worth the laboured passages of prose in between. Much like the pear in the following quote, the style and subtly of the play extracts are hard to describe. The reader’s first encounter with Beatrice and Virgil is when, as I said, Virgil is trying to describe a pear to Beatrice, who has never seen one before…
Virgil: Slice a pear and you will find that its flesh is incandescent white. It glows with inner light. Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark.
This chatter goes on for a while. And without sounding too wet, definitely made me look at pears in a new way, as well as reaffirming my belief that a writer can go on about nothing for pages and pages and still make it as beautiful a piece as anything. Of course Beatrice and Virgil’s back and forth does become far more haunting, with very strong parallels to the holocaust, made all the more haunting for their simple style and earlier, innocent pear-talk.
I think I’ve mused all of the musings I can muse for the time being about this book. It’s been padding around in my head since I read it earlier this year and I still can’t decide what I fully think of it. Whether I’d like it to have been purely the stunningly allegorical donkey and monkey; Beatrice and Virgil, or whether the prose in between just needed a little more work for it to be a five out of five. I don’t know. Anyway, I’m going to file this under ‘Reviewed’ even though I’m a little late for any relevance, and therefore feel compelled to give it a rating. I’m going to have to go for 3.5 out of 5, which can be broken down into 2 for the prose and 5 for the play. I’ll put it this way; at some point I’ll read it again. On my own. Late at night. In one big go. And I’ll probably love it.
CM
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