Brighid

A Faltering Effort

Revisado: 08-25-10

Readers who became fans of Yann Martel through reading his earlier works, The Helsinki Raccamatios and The Life of Pi will be eager to take this journey, but should be warned. We've come to expect the twists and surprise syntheses of his stories. Much of Beatrice and Virgil does similarly entice us forward through a dreamscape seemingly pregnant with metaphor. And yet, this story satisfies on no score of its promise.

This is not an indictment of the violence and seeming nihilism; we need not demand happy endings. Life can suck. Very well. We are happy to engage any reaction to this, from stoic to the prophetic.

Rather, our dissatisfaction is that B&V never collects on its investment. It wanders hither and yon, leading to an abrupt ending, a suckerpunch lacking any revelation of import or meaning. Perhaps Martel meant to lead this work through such fragmentation and alienation as a matter of art, part of the Waiting for Godot riff on the apocalyptic. But on the whole the effect suffices neither art nor meaning. The vignettes are classic Martel, but they relate to no storytold whole. Instead of wabi sabi, the text is just shoddy. There is no pensivity, nor implication to connect, no zen transmission in this koan.

The cataclysmic in life, the daemonic dimension which stripes the land of the Shirt, indeed suffuses us with the bile of fey alienation. Martel is right to investigate this incommunicability of Hell's estate using kabuki gestures: the trembling moment of fierce and indifferent death, a list scratched in donkey fur. But we are disappointed that the vision of this text never dilates outward toward the greater view which Martel historically was so skilled at intimating. It left us to finish the work of the author in our imaginations, embarrassed by his gimmicky insult, rather than pondering and savouring implications.

Rather than whine through his protagonist that readers can't grok, Martel might profit/prophet better by condescending less.

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