Life of Pi

This, friends, is a book recommendation. If you haven't read Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, you should. I read it for the first time this summer and, after plodding through the first couple of chapters, was completely captivated.

Some straight information (in case you're on of those people who just wants to know the basic plot): This is a story about a boy growing up in India, whose father runs a zoo. This is a story about a boy who grows up to be a man who loves religion (he practices three!). This is a story about a boy who is shipwrecked and winds up on a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutang, a zebra, and a tiger. This is a story about survival. This is a wild adventure.

(Ok, that was more or less facts right?)

A bit of persuasion (in case you want to know what I thought about the book): The story starts, "This book was born as I was hungry." (It's in the author's note...read that first, even if you're the sort of person who skips over things that say "Author's Note.") I think this book is about hunger. It spends a lot of time dealing with physical hunger, since this boy is stranded on a lifeboat for over seven months, and is in general trying to avoid being eaten by the tiger on board with him. Martel makes you think about what it must be like to be so hungry you would eat anything. Anything. The madness of survival in the midst of starvation. Pi is driven to animalistic measures as his stomach yearns for life. But this book is about a lot more than physical hunger. This is a story about hungering for something more. Religious hunger, you might say, although I'm not sure that quite captures it.

The key phrase of the book is: "I have a story that will make you believe in God." What kind of hope would you have for a story to convince you there is a God? I think we often think stories make us wish there was a God; they don't make us believe there is a God. But, we underestimate the power of story.

I think what Martel has to say could be taken a couple of different ways. It could either be that it doesn't matter if what we believe is "true", so long as it serves a greater purpose, OR that we are made for something more--joy maybe? I think perhaps Martel means the first thing, but persuaded me of the second. In the story, Pi adopts three different religions: Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam. Each one moves him in a different way. Each one draws from a different part of his soul. Religion is not necessarily about which one is "true," but about the aspects of truth they all have. Perhaps, they all lead to the same thing. Perhaps, they are all different ways of looking at the same story. Pi is against "dry yeastless factuality" and for "the better story." "What moves you?," you can almost imagine him asking you. "You must believe something. Will you settle for the dry and lifeless?"

Martel writes: "Words of divine consciousness: moral exaltation; lasting feelings of elevation, elation, joy; a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as more important than an intellectual understanding of things...An intellect confounded yet a trusting sense of presence and of ultimate purpose."

At least atheism, according to Pi, believes in something--requiring a leap of faith--while agnosticism, which chooses to doubt everything, winds up with nothing. "[T]he agnostic," Pi says, "if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might...to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story."

Reading this book made me wonder, Is that all there is? A better story? Lots of good stories? Stories you choose to believe because the alternative is too much to handle? Stories that move you and reveal parts of the truth, but perhaps all ultimately made of the same cloth? Lewis and Tolkien did not think so. While Martel creates a dichotomy between "feelings of elevation, elation, joy" and "an intellectual understanding of things," the Christian story unites them. Feeling and fact are harmonious in the Gospel. C.S. Lewis writes, "The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical circumstances.” The Gospel is a holistic story, requiring both an imaginative and a reasonable response. Lewis says, “For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher.”God calls us to receive the Gospel both as myth (and thus with joy) and as history (thus as truth). 

The reason I loved Life of Pi is because it reminded me that I love a story that is somewhat wild with imagination. I love the hero who lives in spite of impossible circumstances. I love to feel my soul jostle within me as I long for worlds unknown to me. We all do. It's why we choose the "better story." But we don't choose it because it doesn't matter and the other option is too boring. We choose it because we were made for it. We were made for something more. We were made for wildness and beauty and joy. And we were made to find this in something mind-blowingly true.

If this book is to make you believe in God, it is simply because it will convince you that you want something more because you were made for something more. And, unlike Pi, I don't think it will really satisfy us unless it is true.