Sunday, May 9, 2010

Beatrice and Virgil: Horror by any other name

book cover of 

Beatrice and Virgil 

by

Yann Martel



Yann Martel.  Yann Yann Yann.  I read Life of Pi.  In fact my entire family read it.  It was a mass Christmas gift from my Grandmother to each and every member of the family, which all in all constitutes a good third of the copies sold worldwide.  On behalf of the Beals, you're welcome.

Life of Pi was by most measures a very good book.  The prose was nice and the story was phenomenal, but enough has been said.  No matter any allegiance to the Can-Con gods or touchy feely all-the-children-of -the-world nonsense, his book smacked of pandering.  I'll happily let it slide because it got me thinking differently and I liked reading it.

So I pick up his letters to Stephen Harper and I scratch my head till it bleeds.  He takes a hand preaching to the choir and bangs a drum about the PM not giving him the time of day after he took the trouble to send him a book every week or so for a year.  Answering the letters of an activist (dare I say at this point narcissist) writer is a lose/lose proposition, Martel even admits as much, but he still made a cool fortune pestering him about PMO's penchant for form letters.  Again, Martel pours fuel on the impotent left's campfire and they swipe debit cards en mass in return.

So, some nine years and a requisite visit to the death camp museums after his last novel he unveils his artistic rendering of the Holocaust.  A story told through a selfsame narrator about his relationship with a collaborator and the latter's fragmented post modern play.  The play is about a donkey and a howler monkey (the title characters respectively) who have lived through "The horror" and spend the play trying to establish a context for talking about their torture.  If you're looking to feel sick to your stomach about the human capacity for meanness, this book twists the reader's guts as well as any other on the subject.  In this regard his misstep was drawing on the descriptions of physical torture and a series of horrible "Games for Gustave" questions that navigate ethical and spiritual minefields.  Nine tenths of the book is spent suggesting at the subject of the horrors, in the play and in the Old taxidermist playwright the narrator is so fascinated with. The last tenth is as gruesome a prose as you're likely to come across.  He trades his Beckett cap for a Freddy Kruger mask and the result, though heart-wrenching, abandons any possibility of covering new emotional ground on the matter.  His slip into the literal, both the shocking and the disgusting, and consciously abandons the context he set out to establish.  He either didn't have the forbearance to take it all the way home or was afraid of what following his thesis to a conclusion would mean.  

In the great tradition of CanLit condescension Martel walks us gently through his thesis, holding our hands and pointing out the attractions of the ride.  "This beast is called an elephant.  Yes, he does take up the entire room." Here's the biggest problem:  He purports to try something new in terms of writing about the holocaust.  That might have been a bold endeavour but he cuts his own efforts off at the knees by walking on egg shells the entire time.  The beginning of the novel is an explanation of the allegoric dance that is to follow.  Why does he telegraph his punches?  He wants to set up a pressure release valve.  He builds in a defence against the critic who will rightly ask what the fuck he knows about the Holocaust.  Every sentence is an apology to any B'nai Brith donor who happens to turn the book to a random page.  "I'm not even Jewish!" his protagonist proclaims after being kicked around by his publisher and right before giving up his original essay/artistic interpretation of the Holocaust.  No, he and his creator may not be, but if you want to talk about the Holocaust as a blight on humanity, how it needs to be looked at through different lenses, and about you're position as a gentile artist tackling the subject, you don't start by tripping over a disclaimer.  Asking pardon for drawing breath demeans your efforts and patronizes the reader, jewish or otherwise.  Nothing good came from it.