books

When a writer wins the Booker Prize and sells millions of copies, the follow-up is rarely judged on its own terms. Beatrice and Virgil arrived in 2010 carrying the enormous weight of Life of Pi behind it, a reported three-million-dollar advance ahead of it, and an eight-year silence in between. None of that weight does the book any favours, and a good deal of what is wrong with it has nothing to do with the comparison at all.

The premise is, at minimum, audacious. Henry, a successful author transparently modelled on Martel himself, has just had a strange experimental project rejected by his publisher: a flip-book about the Holocaust, half fiction and half essay, with two front covers and no obvious centre. Defeated, he abandons writing, moves with his pregnant wife to an unnamed European city, takes clarinet lessons, joins an amateur theatre troupe, and works in a chocolate shop while answering fan mail. One letter draws him to the workshop of a taxidermist, also named Henry, an emotionless and faintly sinister man who is writing a play about a stuffed donkey and a stuffed monkey - Beatrice and Virgil, names lifted from Dante's guides through the afterlife. The play, titled A 20th Century Shirt, slowly reveals itself as an allegory of an atrocity its characters refer to only as "the Horrors."

The strongest material is the play itself. When the donkey and the monkey speak, the dialogue is genuinely good - sharp, patient, philosophically alert, with clear debts to Beckett and a flavour of Stoppard. There are passages, especially an extended description of a pear and the catalogue of moral conundrums near the end, that have real force and stay with you. Martel can clearly write a scene, and the central conceit - approaching the Holocaust through animals, as Orwell approached Stalinism in Animal Farm - is not in itself contemptible. It is a serious idea seriously meant.

The trouble is everything around the play. The framing narrative is thin and curiously inert. Henry the author drifts through scenes with little to do, and his relationship with the taxidermist never develops into anything; the two men circle each other for two hundred pages and then the book lurches to a violent, abrupt halt that feels less like an ending than a panic. The prose carries plenty of unnecessary back-story and a number of lazy tics, including the repeated tag "Henry thought," the kind of shortcut you do not expect from a writer of this reputation. At barely two hundred pages the novel is slight, and a surprising amount of that slimness is padding around a much shorter, better piece of theatre. The structure - a play within a semi-autobiographical novel within an extended metaphor - is more clever in description than it is satisfying to read.

Then there is the central question the book cannot escape: should the Holocaust be rendered as an animal fable at all? This is where opinion divides most sharply, and the division is worth taking seriously rather than smoothing over. The allegory can read as an attempt to lift the catastrophe out of its specific Jewish history and fold it into a broader story about suffering and the extermination of animal life, and that move strikes some as not merely a failure of taste but a quiet erasure. The objection is not that an animal allegory is impossible - it is that this one feels evasive, gesturing at horror through a coyness that reduces the unspeakable to the merely tasteful. Defenders argue the obliqueness is the point, that allegory is meant to discomfort a reader who does not already carry the history. Both readings are available in the text, which may be the most honest thing one can say about it.

What lingers, finally, is the gap between ambition and execution. There is no shortage of ambition here; the book wants to interrogate how we represent atrocity, and it asks a real question. But the surrounding novel is too inert, too pleased with its own formal mirroring, to carry the weight it sets itself. The cleverness reads as self-admiration, and self-admiration is a poor companion for this subject. The play wants to be Beckett; the novel wrapped around it too often settles for being a puzzle.

It is not a worthless book - the theatrical core is better than its reputation suggests, and it provokes thought even when it fails. But it is a frustrating, lopsided, and finally unconvincing one. Anyone coming to it expecting another Life of Pi will be bewildered. Anyone coming to it as a serious experiment in Holocaust representation should expect a brave idea housed in a structure that cannot quite bear it. Read it for the donkey and the monkey, and brace for everything around them.