Beatrice and Virgil (Spoilers)

I'd very much like to give Yann Martel's newest novel a much more detailed review than my brain is capable of doing at this hour, but I know that if I wait until tomorrow, it won't happen, so I shall do what I can tonight.

To begin with, I will simply say that I loved Life of Pi and leave it at that.  That book has no bearing on or relation to this new work.  I won't mention it again. 

Very rarely do I actually finish a book that I put it down and feel manipulated, or that I wasted my time.  Very rarely is my experience of a book so contrary to my expectations of it that I feel the need to actually vent about it rather than merely dismissing it as several hours I shall never recover.  Usually if a book is really bad, I put it down somewhere in the middle.  This wasn't one of those books.  This was a book that had a lot of promise, a lot of potential, and I kept waiting for it to break through into something magnificent as I approached the end.  Instead, it took the ending to confirm what I had dreaded through the entire novel: the book was a mess. 

I bought Beatrice and Virgil (pre-ordered it actually) back in March, with the knowledge that I would not have the time to start it until May, when the semester was over.  Once home and unpacked and nicely settled in, I decided to finally start the book I was looking forward to very much (so much so, that I continued to postpone reading Anna Karenina which I've been dying to finish for months).  The beginning of the book truly excited me.  Martel introduces us to his thinly-disguised alter-ego Henry (side note: quite possibly the most awkward, self-absorbed, blunt, pointless, and clumsy portrayal of oneself ever achieved in literature), whose first book was a wild success (hmmm...) and who has settled down to a new and ambitious project: to portray the Holocaust in a new and imaginative way.  Immediately, red flags.  However, these fears are put to rest by Martel/Henry's interesting take on art and the Holocaust, as well his bizarre and creative (and distinctly Martellian) idea for a flip book that is half fiction, half nonfiction.  His philosophical explanations behind this are fascinating.  Then the book is rejected.  Cue writer's block.  At this point we begin to explore the "story" arc which underlies much of the rest of the book: Henry's very pedestrian, work-free, dilettante lifestyle in which he has pets, joins a theater troupe, and begins to learn clarinet.  "What about that flip book, Henry?"

Just as the reader begins to wonder "Why...?" we stumble awkwardly upon the real "plot" of the novel.  A crazy old taxidermist enlists Henry's help (through fan mail) for his play.  A scene from the play is included in the package he sends Henry, a beautiful scene where the two main characters, a howler monkey named Virgil and a donkey named Beatrice, discuss and describe, in captivatingly beautiful imagery, a simple pear.  Alas, once Henry has made contact with the taxidermist and the reader realizes that Martel has tried to clear his writer's block by writing himself as a character (also with writer's block) helping another character in his own creative endeavors, the question is almost inevitable: "Is this it?"  Certainly this was my question, and the reason why the book got neglected for almost two months.  I had no burning desire to pick it up again, for there was simply nothing captivating: no interesting characters, little philosophical depth, barely a plot to speak of, and the constant question of "what is the point of this book?"

Having picked it up again yesterday and finished it tonight, I can tell you that it was less of a point and more of a blunt object, striking you over the head and leaving you dazed and senseless and used.  Near the end I was thinking that the nearly plagiaristically Beckett-like play, "A 20th Century Shirt" (in which two characters banter seemingly about nothing while standing next to a tree, yet in which deep philosophical questions are raised...) would have made a better book if Martel had simply cropped out all the extraneous and unnecessary stuff about his self-serving, and often very condescending and arrogant, attempt to help the taxidermist complete his play and simultaneously save his own writer's soul.  While derivative, the writing in the play was frequently better and more thought-provoking than the prose of the rest of the novel, in which random and pedestrian events intertwine in a hazy jumble interspersed with excerpts from a play which could never have been written by the taxidermist character as described by Martel.  Then, WHAM! In the span of a few pages, we learn that this has been about the Holocaust all along, but that revelation and transition is handled so poorly it seems to come out of nowhere.  So this, then, must be the realization of what Henry had been trying to perfect early in the novel.  Interest reemerging? Then, in literally one page, several non sequiters occur.  First, the taxidermist asks an innocent question probing for input from Henry.  Then, Henry thinks back to the Flaubert story that accompanied the pear excerpt in the fanmail package.  From this (and seemingly nowhere else, except possibly a few heavily veiled lines on the preceding pages) Henry deduces the man is an ex-Nazi collaborator, becomes disgusted and refuses to believe him reformed (for reasons unknown), tries to leave the shop immediately, refuses the copy of the play, gets stabbed by the taxidermist (why?...), escapes, and watches as the taxidermist sets fire to the shop while still inside, wearing a maniacal grin that is completely nothing like the character described up to this point.  A more clumsily handled climax may never have been written by such a talented author.  It comes out of nowhere, is supported by almost nothing that precedes it, makes no point, and leaves no feeling in the reader except bewilderment, disgust, and anger. 

The play perished in the blaze.  Henry regrets this, although it is his refusal of the play that caused it to be lost in the first place, and he recreates what he can remember of the taxidermist, the play, and anything related to those two subjects that he can remember.  Another unexplained about-face from his angry rejection of both of them just pages earlier.  This is just another example of characters doing things for no reason, or acting in ways for which the author does not, and the reader can not, provide any explanation.  The final pages of the book are disturbing, morbid, and unoriginal, taking familiar Holocaust material and presenting it in such a way as to only heighten the revulsion the reader feels by presenting it in the form of "games."  Given that any Holocaust reference up to this point (besides Henry's failed novel) has been told metaphorically through the eyes of two animals, this is abrupt and random, possibly more for shock value or to tug on our emotions than for any real literary reason. 

Holocaust stories will always be emotional in some way.  Those of us who aren't Jewish or who did not descend from victims of that terrible slaughter (like myself and, incidentally, Martel) do not feel the pain of that massacre any less, for it was not merely an assault on one group of people, it was an assault on humanity.  This is why to this day this is one topic that is always handled with extreme caution because it conjures up such a multitude of emotions in us all, from terrible sadness for the victims, to horror at the darkness and evil of which humanity is capable, to anger at the perpetrators, to the realization that an entire nation of people, ordinary good and bad people like all of us, sat by and did nothing and turned away.  It is important that we not ignore the subject, and I agree with Henry/Martel that it should be expressed in new forms, just as other momentous and tragic events are in history.  Yet it is impossible to not feel tricked by this book.  The title, the cover featuring the two animals in a desert landscape, the entire middle portion of the book, do not give any indication as to the book's subject matter.  By the middle of the novel, we are convinced that Martel has left those intriguing ideas behind.  Then suddenly, without giving readers a chance to decide if they really are in the mood to read about the Holocaust, Martel hits us rapid-fire with a series of seemingly unrelated thoughts and events which add nothing to the discussion of or perception of the Holocaust (in fact, it makes no new points at all about the Holocaust after the first few pages).  Like it or not, the images are burned into our brains, but we are left wondering how they have helped us come to terms with that horrible atrocity.  We have been caught unsuspecting and Martel has taken advantage of this to bludgeon us over the head with his point - the problem is, he doesn't have one. 

Clumsy in character development, storytelling, language, transition, and treatment of subject matter, this novel showcases none of the brilliance which Yann Martel exhibited in his first book.  Instead, it makes just about every mistake a novel can make in only 200 pages.  It would be easily forgettable were it not for its treatment of the Holocaust and its tremendously bad ending.  Instead, it becomes memorably bad.


2/5. (for its redeeming qualities and latent potential)