Yann Martel on writing Life of Pi: 'You want a sense that it was written in one breath'

It’s frustrating on both counts: authors tend to be reserved, and their archival holdings – when institutionally managed – obscure. Martel and his papers are neither. His archive catalogue alone makes for better reading than most novels: I end up copying fragments of it into my diary such as – 
 
‘A letter by Martel discussing Indian literature, the morality of sperm donations (a means of extra income for Martel in his student days) and Martel’s progress on his novel Life of Pi’ 
 
and – 
 
‘A letter detailing Martel’s opinions on government budget cuts in the cultural sector.  While Martel opposes the cuts (“A government with no sense of cultural identity is one that erases itself from the annals of history”), he disputes the common assertion that the cuts will diminish Canadian culture and lead to Americanization, as art comes from artists, not institutions, and artists – with or without funding – cannot resist the imperative to create (“If need be, writers will self-publish…orchestras and opera companies will go to the street and busk, dancers will dance for nothing, and painters will paint with their excrement.”)’ 
 
and – 

‘…a work-in-progress: a play about spectators at a play, who are waiting for the play, Waiting for Godot, to start.  The play has very little dialogue in the traditional sense, and most of what the audience hears are the thoughts of the spectators broadcast through a loudspeaker.  The spectators’ thoughts are sometimes heard alone, and at other times overlap with those of other spectators so that the two are heard simultaneously.  The script consequently rather resembles a musical score.  Even in draft form, the work demonstrates Martel’s undeniable genius and originality.’ 

Writing Life of Pi initiated the process Martel has used for all his books since: a system of envelopes that structure his research and writing. ‘I’m puzzled that it seems to be so strange or different to most people,’ he tells me, ‘Because I don’t know how others write their books. I can imagine writing a haiku not needing to have a system. But once you’re talking about a novel that’s over 200 pages, I don’t know how you would keep all the various ideas in your head.’

The envelopes themselves come in two sizes: eight and a half by eleven inches, and a few smaller. He holds them up for me: they’re plain, yellow-ish brown postal envelopes, labelled with Sharpie in Martel’s block capital writing. ‘Into those, I would put all the ideas. It’s a way of taking notes in an extensive and extended way. My process in writing a novel is that I get an idea. It has to be more than an anecdote; it has to be something that can be reread by me, and by readers several times. An idea that has depth and breadth.’ 
 
In the first stages of his research, Martel compiled a digital file of the material he would need: paragraphs from 19th and 20th century books about survival at sea, extracts from articles about zoo biology and the question of how animals can be successfully enclosed in confined spaces, passages from religious texts, and subsequent writings on them, as well as snippets from the book as they came to him – a way of thinking aloud.

‘But the file ended up being 600 pages long, all over the place,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘So I printed it out and cut up each section. They went into envelopes which were ordered by their place in the novel. It meant that when I actually started writing, I could just open up the first envelope, which was the author’s note. And then go to the next envelope, which concerned Pi in Canada – little things about University of Toronto, and so on.’ 

In the novel’s final third, following his rescue after over 200 days at sea, Pi is interviewed by Japanese transport officials, who refuse to believe his story. When offered a more believable but crueller alternative, they admit to preferring his original account.

Thinking through the novel precisely, Martel tells me, was an essential process to stretching what a reader could believe in it. It’s a large ask, by any account, to imagine that one could survive 227 days at sea with a tiger. ‘Everything in part one was preparing the reader for part two,’ he says. ‘In part two, we start with the shipwreck. Of course, one can believe in a shipwreck: they happen all the time. But how can we believe that Pi could have been in a lifeboat with a wild animal? Well, we could because of what I wrote in part one about territoriality, and because we know Pi has a zoo. That’s all kind of plausible, and the reader, so to speak, climbs on board.

‘Then there is the question of his survival. How could a reader believe that? Well, because I told you about dominance and submission between animals and their carers in the first part, and so on. So the reader still goes along. And then there’s the [carnivorous] island. It was the hardest part to pull off because I wanted to stretch the limits of what you could believe. That’s the point where spontaneous belief starts to crumble: rationality kicks in.’ Yet all of this is informed by Martel’s approach to magical thinking. 
 
‘In part one I had to spoon-feed the reader notions about religion – because, to me, most urban Western readers are secular; possibly also anti- religious. I was trying to discuss a very difficult theme of religion, without wanting to be, in any way, evangelical. I wanted them to consider this alternate, other form of magical thinking, which has been blighted by a lot of extremism. I had to present it in a sympathetic light.

‘Part one is needed to open the reader up. But once I was in it, the writing very much felt spontaneous. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been joyful. If it’s just a chore, writing up the sentences because they’re preordained, there’s no fun at all. And, in fact, the writing was an utterly joyful experience. It was such a good time writing that book.’ 

‘We are, presumably, better for it,’ he says, ‘We are better for believing more than we are for believing less in the long term. That was the trick in part one of Life of Pi. Yes: I wanted you to believe in what happened, but I want that to be stretched – up until you get to the second story, which is totally believable, but which represents man’s inhumanity to man.’ This, to him, is the lesser option. ‘I wanted that second, more realistic rendering of the story to show that what we’re all willing to believe is that we’re going to be beasts when we’re in difficult circumstances – when the fact is that’s not true. You see that in Ukraine all the time: people helping each other at the peril of their own lives. That is more who we are.’ 
 
There comes a point, for all the politesse I was raised with, where I can’t resist asking whether Martel has ever been tempted by any kind of spirituality himself. It happens just after he speaks about his gratitude for having been connected to a network of readers across the globe through his novel; about having kept letters from readers who were ill, whether mentally or physically, and connected Pi’s relationship with Richard Parker to their own relationship with their failing health.

For all the exuberance of his winning moment in 2002, and the eclectic, intelligent wealth of his archive holdings, he is much more careful than I expected – generous, to be sure, but methodical in what he chooses to say, and precise in following up his points with evidence, whether researched or anecdotal.

Yet when he describes having been afforded the ability to meet strangers on the common ground of his writing, and to hear their interpretations of his text, it’s the warmest his voice sounds during our call. I do what some people’s parents tell them never to do. I ask about his own, personal, relationship with religion. 
 
‘I’m not dogmatic,’ he permits. ‘But if there has been religious thinking persistently for thousands of years, in all kinds of expressions…to me they’re like wells being dug into the earth, trying to reach some divine water beneath it. They’re all different attempts, just as there are different ways to clothe the body, or feed the body.

‘To live a life with zero religion and zero art is to be barely human. And both are corruptible. We all know what the corruptions of religion are. There are corruptions of art too: some of our most revered artists are not particularly kind people, like Pablo Picasso or Marlon Brando.’ 
 

Our time is almost up. His daughter, who has been seated patiently beside him for the interview’s duration points out with the alacrity of a literary agent that we’ve overrun our originally planned half- hour. To close off, I ask the question I ask all Booker authors: who, in his Booker cohort, does he particularly admire? 
 
‘Obviously, Salman Rushdie is brilliant,’ he says at once. ‘And I remember being struck by William Golding’s Lord of the Flies as a kid. But my favourite living writer is J.M. Coetzee. I find him the most amazing writer because he does so much with so little, and I like that spareness. I met him once, at a literary festival.’ 
 
He grimaces slightly. Yes, I smile with some irony. It’s difficult meeting people you admire. ‘Well, there was a dinner,’ he recalls, ‘I was sitting down, and suddenly my partner called, so I left to answer the call. And in the meantime, Coetzee came to sit down. Then this wonderful Israeli writer named Etgar Keret sat down next him for three quarters of the meal, but had no idea who he was. And I thought, f***, I could have been sat next to Coetzee. But how would I have handled it? I wouldn’t have wanted to put him in a shell by saying “I like your writing.” I might have more likely talked about a book he might have liked…’ 
 
When we end the call, I am left, as one often is, with the dry kind of silence that accompanies finishing a Zoom meeting: the fact of not having travelled, and the collapse of the illusion that you have been close to someone. In the run-up to our speaking, Martel suggested that we hold off until mid-June and meet in person, at which point he would be in the U.K. with his family – but, for various reasons, my deadline did not permit it.

F***, I think. I could have been sat next to Yann Martel.