[In the following review of The Life of Pi, Skidelsky offers high praise for Martel's vivid descriptions and imaginative, compelling narration.]

In an interview a few years ago, Julian Barnes explained why it had taken him eight years to complete his semi-autobiographical first novel, Metroland. For too long, he felt constrained by the facts of his own life as they had happened. Even though he was writing a novel, he still didn't feel entirely free to invent. Only on realising that the truth was his to embellish had the novel finally taken shape. So plausibly rendered were Barnes's inventions, in fact, that several French journalists wrongly assumed that a scene in the novel, in which the protagonist loses his virginity in Paris, was true. …

How refreshing … to read another novel with a nautical theme, but one that avoids the prosaic altogether. Yann Martel's Life of Pi is a riotous imaginative excursion, the account of 16-year-old Pi—the son of a zookeeper—who emigrates from his home in India to Canada in a lifeboat, accompanied by a hyena, a zebra, an orang-utan and a Royal Bengal tiger. The reason for this peculiar mode of transport is that the rest of Pi's family—along with their other animals—have drowned in a shipwreck, leaving Pi and his crew to fend for themselves in the shark-infested waters of the Pacific Ocean.

Naturally, it is an entirely improbable scenario, but this does not matter, because the telling is so compelling. Unlike [Colin] Thubron and [Philip] Marsden, Martel has allowed his imagination free rein. Who, after all, needs plausibility when you've got close-quarter descriptions of ferocious animals tearing into one another (“The zebra was being eaten alive from inside”; “There was a noise of organic crunching as windpipe and spinal cord were crushed”)?

There are many vivid descriptions, and the whole novel is infused with such childlike exuberance that the odd clumsy expression (“I didn't have pity to spare for long for the zebra”) is easy to forgive.