[In the following mixed review of The Life of Pi, Kaveney argues that the discussions of religious issues within the novel are unconvincing.]

Sometimes, the best part of a novel is not the elaborate constructions which go to create a plausible fictional world, but the single mad sentence that might be used to pitch the screenplay in Hollywood. In the case of Yann Martel's Life of Pi, the thing that makes the book memorable is not the overly cute, bordering on patronizing, narrative of how his hero Pi came to take his name, adopt many religions and grow up in Pondicherry as the son of a zoo-keeper. It is the story of how he manages to survive for eight-and-a-half months in an open boat in the Pacific in the company of an adult Bengal tiger, keeping both his sanity and all of his organs.

Surrounding this solid core of events is rather more in the way of authenticating narrative than is perhaps desirable. We get Martel back-packing in India; his encounter with Pi Patel's uncle, who tells him of a story that will convince him, and allegedly us, of the existence of God; Martel's meetings with Pi and the chutneys with which Pi delights his palate; Pi's musings on his later career and how the experiences we are still waiting to hear about changed his life. Above all, we get the account of his childhood, an account which replicates not so much lived Indian experience as read Indian novels. Martel is a gifted pasticheur, but there are times when his impersonation risks dating as badly as Peter Sellers.

Pi's full name is “Piscine”, and he takes the mathematical symbol as his nickname rather than being called after body functions by his schoolmates; Martel is not above a certain laboured cuteness. His father runs a zoo—this sets our young hero up with a lot of knowledge he will need in the later part of the book, but also involves some jejune meditations on humanity's relationship with animals, as well as a profusion of lyrical passages about fur, feather and flower—the zoo is sited in a botanical garden. Much of all of this is luminously written, but it holds up the story.

The cargo ship carrying Pi, his family and a few of their animals to a new life in Canada sinks, and Pi finds himself adrift with a zebra, an orang-utan, a hyena and the tiger. Rapidly, the animals consume each other and Pi is left as the tiger's next meal—his only option is to tame the brute with whistles, sea-sickness and fish. All of this is imagined in detail and with a sense of the sheer terror of coming face-to-face with a great beast. Aside from a few ineffective moments—an encounter with a sinister floating island in particular—this part of the book has the excitement that is one of the things we read fiction for: not for comedies of manners alone, but for an evocation of the unfamiliar or the barely imaginable.

However, when it comes to the book's purported message—that in some sense we will be persuaded of the necessity of religious faith—Martel confuses assertion with proof. It is his father's lectures about practicalities that keep Pi alive, not his cultivation of all the religious available to him; the book's hostility towards agnosticism never amounts to a case for godliness. In a final interview with marine insurers, Pi concocts a superficially more plausible narrative of cannibalism and madness; like us, they prefer the story of the boy in a boat with a tiger. But an aesthetic preference it remains—not an objective proof; Yann Martel has constructed a powerful fable, not, fortunately, a Holy Book.