Category Archives: Reviews

More Than Meets the Eye: Volume 5

1 Reply

Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Volume 5 (Transformers (Numbered))Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Volume 5

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

How do you take an 80s toy franchise and make legitimate science fiction storytelling out of it? I’ll give you a hint: it has nothing to do with Michael Bay.

The Transformers are an interesting phenomenon. On the one hand, they represent the point in time when the boundary between making cartoons and selling toys finally broke down completely, and they were the opening salvo in what for many of us was a childhood filled with half-hour toy advertisements thinly disguised as entertainment. On the other hand, in the hands of the right writers they had the makings of truly epic science fiction: sentient robots who had been fighting a war for six million years and whose very bodies were shaped into vehicles and weapons. (The original animated movie was somewhere in the middle: a feature length toy advertisement with a plot only a seven-year-old could–and did–love, it was for many of us the first introduction to gorgeous Japanese animation and its potential for bringing giant robots to life.)

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, it is in the comic book medium– which seems especially suited for walking the line between outright commercialization and original storytelling– that the Transformers as credible science fiction have best found their niche. This happened originally in the final arch of the original Marvel run back in the 90s, written by Simon Furman and pencilled by Andy Wildman. Furman and Wildman together created an interpretation of the Autobots and Decepticons in which the corrosion of millennia of war was evident, and they gave an additional space operatic depth by a mythological explanation of the Transformers’ origins and position as guardians against the embodiment of Chaos. It worked (for too short a time), and I’ve dutifully passed on the Titan Book reprints of these runs on to my own kids.

Since then I’ve obligingly checked out the various reincarnations of the franchise, most often with the waste of time and money. (Come on, they’re giant transforming robots? How much depth do you really expect?) When I learned that IDW had split their Transformers run into two separate ongoing series a couple years ago, I figured the first collected volume of each might make appropriate Christmas gifts for my twin sons. I’d have to read them first, of course, so I flipped a coin and ordered volume one of More Than Meets the Eye. I quickly realized that a) this wasn’t a series for kids (or at least not for kids as young as my kids are), and b) this was what I had been waiting for since Furman and Wildman.

I’ve waxed eloquent on the merit of this series in my reviews of the previous four volumes, so I’ll try to keep my comments here constrained to the fifth and latest installment. All along, Roberts has been laying track to some epic conclusions but more importantly taking the time to build characters and backstory along the way. Milne’s artwork and eye for detail takes it up another notch. (Have you ever considered how difficult it must be to convey emotions on a robotic visage lacking nose, mouth, and other characteristic facial features?) My major (and really only) complaint with the series so far was the fact that Milne left the helm for the artwork of a few issues in volume four. It’s not that I don’t mind a different artist, but some of those who were drawing for issues in that volume simply weren’t up to the task of communicating the scenes and moods Roberts was creating.

I’ve tried to express the shear delight of this series before: imagine all your childhood friends getting together on a spaceship and going off to have adventures. In some sense, that’s all there is to it. On another level though, Roberts is writing science fiction in the best tradition, and doing it well. Remember, these are nearly-immortal robots who have known nothing but millennia of warfare. Exploring issues like what peace means to lifeforms whose very bodies are weapons, answering questions about mortality and origins, looking at what relationships might develop among a species that lacks gender– and doing it all with pathos and humor. This is what you can expect with this series.

Volume five in no way disappoints and even more encouragingly avoids two of the greatest dangers that often begin to afflict a series once it’s been going on for a while. The first danger with any continuing series is that subsequent issues will simply continue to string the reader along by adding mystery to mystery and refusing to provide any real resolutions. (Think the first few volumes of The Unwritten, or, from what I understand, the entire series of Lost.) Enough of this and you start to suspect that maybe the writer isn’t actually planning on resolving anything or maybe doesn’t have a plan at all. Maybe (horror!) they’re more interested in you purchasing the next issue than telling a great story. I started to get that dreaded feeling with the end of volume four, especially related to the fate of Ultra Magnus. An additional twist? And there was still so much that hadn’t yet been explained!

But in volume five there are answers, and we go places. The quest takes a major step forward. The fate of Ultra Magnus is explained, but more importantly the mystery of Skids’ immediate past, which had been lingering since the first volume, is resolved. New characters are introduced and some old ones are dispatched. The volume consists of a five-issue story arch in which our heroes discover a lost moon of Cybertron and defeat a character we’ve only heard alluded to in the past plus an additional one-shot character piece that gives nice breathing space before the series goes off to play in a big IDW crossover for a while. The writing and the art is as solid as I’ve come to expect.

The second danger of a continuing series is that certain (i.e. main) characters become more or less untouchable by default, so there’s eventually a lack of tension. You know the main characters are going to make it, no matter how grim things look. The redshirts are not. The best writers of course push this convention as far as the franchise (and it is, after all, a franchise) will allow, at times even turning it on its head. They make you care about redshirts, and then kill them (which happens in this volume). Or they “kill” a main character, but in a way you don’t expect (which is what happens to Ultra Magnus but doesn’t feel like a throwaway because it fundamentally alters the way you think about the character).

There’s a lot to love here (especially if you love giant transforming robots), but one of my favorite things about this series is the depth it brings to the character of Rodimus. I was never an Optimus Prime kid. Prime always seemed to me rather flat and over-idealized as a character. There’s not a lot to him besides 100% leadership and responsibility and seriousness all the time. Rodimus was different. If Optimus Prime was your dad, Rodimus was your cool older brother. He was the guy who stumbled into greatness and was never comfortable with the responsibility but craved the fame and glory. Roberts does great things with his character in this volume, balancing his headstrong immaturity with his responsibility to his crew. And all the while you know– or you know if your Tranformers mythos was highly influenced by the animated movie– that something is building. Rodimus is going to be central to something big, more than simply playing at being Captain Awesome (which he does quite well).

I’ve heard a rumor that this volume wraps up the first “season” of More than Meets the Eye and that Roberts has at total of five plotted out. I hope this is true, and I hope indeed that IDW knows what they have going on here and allow Roberts and Milne to keep up the good work. Because, come on? Making art and literature out of giant transforming space robots? That were originally toys cobbled together from two disparate Japanese toy lines and given a thin veneer of backstory to help them sell better? We need more of that kind of crazy.

The Land Across

Leave a reply

The Land AcrossThe Land Across by Gene Wolfe

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Gene Wolfe won my undying devotion by being the author of the books that pushed me across the borderland from science fiction and fantasy to literature. (There’s no hard and fast border between the two. It’s a spectrum, but when you start reading Wolfe you realized you’ve definitely wandered– or plunged– into the literary side of this spectrum.) The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, and all of the Sun books are enough to cement his reputation, and they remain among my all-time favorite books. Yet the man is still writing, and I’m still obligingly reading everything that comes from his pen or whatever word-processing software he uses. The Land Across, a standardly (for Wolfe) unclassifiable novel that straddles the boundary between crime mystery, international espionage thriller, and supernatural fantasy, is his latest.

I’ll be honest, some of his most recent stand-alone novels seem like they could be a bit inaccessible to someone not familiar with Wolfe and his tricks. I come to them with a predisposition to love the writing and the writer. Even so, I left An Evil Guest with a confused frown and The Sorcerer’s House with a wry sigh. I closed The Land Across with a perplexed grin. It was nowhere near (to me) as impenetrable as Castleview (for which I lack the Arthurian key). Of all Wolfe’s novels, the one of which it reminded me the most was There Are Doors, but with the soft alienness of a foreign country instead of a parallel dimension. (I also recall Doors as having lots of conversations in cafes, as does Land.)

On the surface, the plot is not straightforward at all. In fact, it’s bewilderingly complex. The main character, Grafton, wants to write a travel book about an unnamed and difficult-to-reach Eastern European country. While traveling there by train he gets picked up by the border patrol and arrested as a possible spy. Under a loose sort of house arrest, he agrees to rent a (probably) haunted house in which there is reputed to be treasure. He gets kidnapped by an underground revolutionary movement and eventually arrested again by the country’s secret police. When his cell-mate escapes, the secret police enlist Grafton to help track the man down. The escapee seems to know some magic, and a secret society of Satanists gets involved. Mysteries are solved. Long conversations are held in cafes. Women (who, married or not, seem to throw themselves at the narrator) are obligingly slept with. Grafton gets awarded a medal by the country’s dictator. Then he goes back to see if he can find the treasure in the haunted house.

If all that seems rather random and scattered, it is. But the genius of Wolfe’s writing is the way he makes it all seem natural. There are aspects of the supernatural and the surreal, but as with most of Wolfe’s writing these aspects are subtle and the bones of the story are the people and the conversations they have. Wolfe is the only writer I know who can create what seems like an action-packed novel but where most of the action is actually taking place in conversations over cafe tables. He is a master of relaying dialogue the way it actually occurs in conversations. People talk like real people in Wolfe’s novels, with all the logical leaps and half-understood or misunderstood transfers of information that this normally entails. The challenge is that Wolfe doesn’t put you in the narrator’s head, so you’re required to make the leaps and conclusions on your own. The narrator might throw you a clue, but for the most part he assumes you can keep up.

I was left, as I so often am after reading Wolfe, with the feeling that there was a lot more going on in the novel than I figured out. Even though, as far as Wolfe novels go, there was a fair degree of closure. There are lingering puzzles: the jarring and dream-like way in which Grafton was first taken off the train at the beginning of the novel, the unnamed lady he meets a few times and then exits the narrative with, and finally the ghostly figure of the Leader himself (as well as Vlad the Impaler) that haunts Grafton throughout the story. But these aren’t large enough or central enough that their mystery detracts from feeling as though I’ve understood the story at all. (Though, with Wolfe, you can’t get away from the feeling that he’s laughing at you because the real story, the secret story taking place in the sewers beneath or the back alleys behind the narrative hinges on solving these lingering mysteries.)

Wolfe’s novels should be read multiple times, ideally immediately after having finished it for the first time. But I am still a bit of a lazy reader, so I was pleased The Land Across did not immediately draw me into a story of tangential pathways and dizzying divergences like Abel’s quest in the Wizard Knight books. Indeed, once Grafton fell in with the secret police, the “case” of solving where his escaped cellmate was and finding the identity of the head of the secret Satanist cult formed a more or less consistent thread on which the novel rested. And this thread was, at least superficially, resolved.

Phantastes

Leave a reply

PhantastesPhantastes by George MacDonald

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lots of thoughts on this book. It’s not great fantasy. The plot meanders, leaves things unfulfilled and under-explained or simply unfinished. A man wanders into the land of Faerie and then wanders out again. The language at times is eye-rollingly bad. But it’s also easy to see the gems, the bits of wonder and humility, that so effected C. S. Lewis. Consider what MacDonald writes near the end, as an analogy of love for Christ:

“This . . . is a true man. I will serve him, and give him all worship, seeing in him the embodiment of what I would fain become. If I cannot be noble myself, I will yet be servant to his nobleness.”

Or later, about love:

“I knew now, that it is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another . . . All true love will, one day, behold its own image in the eyes of the beloved, and be humbly glad.”

Here the bits that  “baptized” the imagination of Lewis, as well as the universalism that apparently got MacDonald in trouble as a minister. The conclusion of the narrator’s wanderings in Faerie, the moral for him, is given at the end:

“May the world be brighter for me, at least in those portions of it, where my darkness falls not. Thus I, who set out to find my Ideal, came back rejoicing that I had lost my Shadow.”

And the final farewell, reminiscent of Wolfe’s “good fishing” line at the end of the Short Sun books:

“A great good is coming– is coming– is coming to thee, Anodos . . . Yet I know that good is coming to me– that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it.”

Godric

Leave a reply

GodricGodric by Frederick Buechner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The life of a saint is a peculiar thing. As I mentioned in a recent review of the writings of St. Seraphim, hagiography can make me acutely uncomfortable. Time and distance tend to polish the contours of anyone’s life, and a saint viewed through the lens of their own writings is often more comfortable than one in the flesh or even one depicted by contemporary accounts.

Frederick Buechner brings a saint to life in Godric, but it’s a real life, and in more ways than one. Buechner took an account of a historical saint from medieval England and built a life with the pieces history had provided. The skill with which he accomplishes this alone makes the book worthwhile, as England is a land with a rich and deep history entwined with Christianity. Godric would pair well with something like the Ecclesiastical History of the Venerable Bede. Buechner’s Godric is born the year before the Norman invasion and provides a Zinn-like “people’s history” view of the rise and fall of monarchies through the eyes of a merchant, a pilgrim, and finally a monk.

Then there is what the book says about sanctity, and this is where Buechner’s genius really shines. The book is not plot-driven, not riveting in the sense of chapters ending on cliffhangers or some over-arching mystery to solve or eminent peril to resolve. It’s something much more real: it’s a life. It’s about how Godric tried to find God. There are brushes with the supernatural, but they are merely hints and shadings. What Buechner drives home is Godric’s own, very human, search. There is no dramatic conversion. There are instead seemingly aimless wanderings as Godric tries to come to grips with his own fear, his own selfishness, and his seeming inability to do true good to those around him. It is in some respect an account of everyone’s life.

What makes Godric a saint? For Buechner it was two things: the perception that people formed of his sanctity, as he lived out the final half of his life in a hermitage beside the River Wear, and something much harder to define. It wasn’t his miracles. Those could be explained away. It wasn’t his holiness or sinlessness, as Buechner makes abundantly clear. As an anchorite, Godric is crotchety, impatient, and sometimes despairing. Moreover, the single more or less constant theme in his life is a relationship that provides the impetus that sends Godric wandering in the first place and which is ultimately culminated in incest and murder.

The thing about sanctity that Buechner might be telling us (and he is indeed saying much, and saying it very well in this book) is that Godric is a saint because he is desperate. He desperately wants to divorce himself from his own sinfulness. He desperately wants to know the love of God, and he’s crazy and stubborn enough to become one of those people who live out this desperation not enmeshed in the relationships within which most of the rest of us live out the struggle but in isolation, discipline, and constant prayer.

There is something else that makes this book wonderful. This is the voice Buechner creates for Godric; it is what makes the novel truly come to life. There’s not only the tone and the style in which he speaks, nor the harsh clarity that makes you know there was a real, breathing person behind these thoughts. There’s also the rhythm. The entire novel reads like a prose poem, with the flow of each sentence and phrase running with a steady cadence, fitting for the life of a saint who is credited as the first English lyric poet. It is almost intoxicating, carrying the reader along like the River Wear must have whispered constantly to Hermit Godric. Godric is a beautiful book beautifully crafted, and I’d love to find an audiobook version by a talented reader.

St. Seraphim of Sarov

Leave a reply

Little Russian Philokalia: St. Seraphim of SarovLittle Russian Philokalia: St. Seraphim of Sarov by Seraphim Rose

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m still enough of an evangelical that hagiography strikes me as foreign. I don’t know what to make of it, this idea that holiness can come out from the introspective realm of spiritual instruction to impinge on historical figures and alleged historical events. Which is perhaps why this first volume of the Little Russian Philokalia, the writings of St. Seraphim, seemed progressively stranger as I read through it.

St. Seraphim lived from the middle of the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth, during which time he became one of the best-known mystics of the Russian Orthodox Church. He lived as a monk and ascetic in the Sarov Monastery in eastern Russia (a city known today as being the center of the Russian nuclear industry). This volume collects the saint’s “Spiritual Instructions” and “Acquisition of the Holy Spirit” as well as an account of the rediscovery and return of his relics.

I found the first portion of the book, the “Spiritual Instructions,” the most accessible. They provided, as I had hoped, some challenging and focusing readings for Lent. Similar to The Practice of the Presence of God, The Imitation of Christ, or other classic works of Christian instruction, these are the sorts of words it seems necessary to always have on tap as a Christian reader. The concise, clear, sharp challenges that, if maybe I let them wash against me constantly like a stream against stone, might actually do some good. How to be silent. How to be generous. How to cultivate a true love of God and others. St. Seraphim’s instructions were also useful because they could provide an avenue into the writings of other Orthodox fathers, as he intersperses them with the words of older saints as well as scripture.

In the second portion of the book I was on less familiar ground, taking the first steps into the thick, alien forest of Russian hagiography. This portion, the “Acquisition of the Holy Spirit,” is a conversation purported to have taken place between the saint and one of his disciples, recorded and only found years later in the days leading up to St. Seraphim’s canonization. Here my cynicism begins to raise its head a bit as the author of the spiritual instructions becomes move into the historical narrative. Because historical figures are always notoriously human, and when they’re not, when they’re portrayed as somehow otherworldly beings, I don’t quite know what to make of it. Several hundred years ago is one thing; the 1830s is something else.

Finally, the volume concludes with (again, to my post-evangelical, Western sensibilities) the strangest and yet most compelling portion of the story. Strange in the sense that here we’re fully in the realm of hagiography, with a dash of apocalyptic prophecy thrown in for good measure. Compelling in the glimpse it provides into the sudden and tragic destruction of the religious heritage of Orthodox Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution and its slow and fitful rebirth in the closing decades of the twentieth century. St. Seraphim’s relics are recovered and returned to Sarov, where a church is rebuilt to receive him. Pilgrims flock to the procession. Miracles ensue. What to make of it all?

The paradox is that sanctity, the idea that holiness can truly intrude into the world in very real and tangible circumstances, remains for me one of the most viable arguments for the pursuit of the Christian life. And the first portion of this book illustrates to me the appeal: that a life pursued in humility, love, and devotion is possible. Yet if there are people who truly embody this, as St. Seraphim was reported to, why is it so hard to accept that the results that follow might be the sort of miracles and happenings outlined in the third part? We want our saints at a safe distance, their words coming down to us through the filter of the centuries. It’s harder to deal with them otherwise.

Cold Beer and Crocodiles

Leave a reply

Cold Beer and Crocodiles: A Bicycle Journey into AustraliaCold Beer and Crocodiles: A Bicycle Journey into Australia by Roff Smith

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I first met Roff Smith in Northwestern Australia, as he was in the middle of his bike trip around the continent. Not in person, of course. I read one of his National Geographic articles among some back issues shelved at my folks’ house. But I recently finished Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country, and Bryson was right: this was an incredible place that I needed to learn more about. I recalled Smith’s articles and wondered if they were collected into a book. A bit of searching, an interlibrary loan, and I was off.

Roff’s book documents his 10,000-mile biking odyssey around the perimeter of Australia. Departing from Sydney, he travels north up the coast and proceeds to bike across every Australian state (and one territory), including Tasmania. Smith’s prose is that of a reporter, documenting his travels and the places through which he passes. His account primarily focuses on the people though– from ranchers to campers to Catholic missionaries. He sees the land on a level that makes Bryson’s account seem penned by a funny fat man breezing through the country in a car. But Bryson is the better writer, and Smith (perhaps because he’s pedaling the better part of 100 miles each day) doesn’t spend the time going into the natural history and accounts of past explorers that make Bryson’s work such fascinating read. If you want an eye-level account of the aching emptiness of much of Western Australia though, as well as snapshots into the life of those who make such out-of-the-way places home, Smith’s account is a good place to start.

My only complaint (besides the terrible puns he uses as chapter headings) is that because the account we get of the landscape is tied to this single bicycle expedition, by the time he’s reached Southern Australia he’s tired and sick and pushing for home. I would have liked to have spent more time here. Also, there’s a laconic nature to the descriptions. There are lots of spots on his maps he breezes through, and the only picture we get of them is what he ate, drank, and the room he slept in. After nine months and 10,000 miles, I would liked to have read more.

Still though, I came away from this book with lots of other leads of classical accounts of travel in the Outback to check out, but the main thing I took away?

I need to get a bicycle like that.

Essays from the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews

Leave a reply

Essays from the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews by John F.W. Herschel

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Historians of Victorian science often speak about a common intellectual context that fragmented in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The growth of scientific disciplines, the specialization of fields, and the proliferation of specialized journals made it difficult to stay abreast of all developments in science or maintain a synthetic view of the entire field. What’s more, as science became professionalized, science writing moved to periodicals and publications written specifically for scientists. There arose a divide between science and popular writings or cultural criticism that largely remains to this day.

The Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews represented what popular, high-brow literature looked like before these changes took place. In their glory days at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Reviews were a place to discuss politics and culture– including science. This collection of essays and poems by John Herschel illustrates the place that science held in popular culture. Though largely forgotten today, Herschel was arguably the leading popular figure in science in the generation before Einstein. In these essays he discusses everything from Laplace’s celestial mechanics to Whewell’s philosophy of science to Quetelet’s statistics. What’s fascinating is the detailed (though largely non-mathematical) treatment he goes into for a “popular” audience. These essays, important for historians of Victorian society in general and astronomy in particular, are recommended reading (or, more likely, skimming) for anyone who is interested in the sort of treatment science was given in the Victorian period for the general, educated reader.

The Place of the Lion

Leave a reply

The Place of the LionThe Place of the Lion by Charles Williams

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Williams is an author in whose work the plot itself (at times obscure and even tedious) is second to the style in which it is written, which is in turn second to the ideas he wants to communicate. It’s the ideas that are rich. This is appropriate for a book about Platonic ideals breaking into the physical world. I read Williams for the first time years ago, after a return from Oxford and the realization that there was an Inkling of whom I had never heard. If you’ve read Lewis’s THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH, you’ve some idea of what to expect. Philosophical fantasy in 1930s England. Returning to Williams now, after having some proper grounding in philosophical studies, I’m enjoying him much more. He is admittedly more dense and verbose than a Lewis or Tolkien. I still found myself rolling my eyes a bit as the novel reached its conclusion. But throughout there is also that bright strangeness one finds in the other Inklings, Gene Wolfe, sometimes in Borges, more boisterously in Chesterton, and more hilariously in Lafferty– the idea that the world is a terrifyingly good place. That is a world these writers live in, and they believe it to be the true world. I’d like to believe it too– or at least, act and write as though it were.

The Idea of a Christian College

2 Replies

The Idea of a Christian College: A Reexamination for Today's UniversityThe Idea of a Christian College: A Reexamination for Today’s University by Todd C. Ream

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book was not what I wanted it to be. That may be my own fault. When I read an interview with the authors, I was immediately interested. As someone who graduated from a Christian university, did graduate work at another Christian university, and will soon resume teaching at my alma mater, I believe an articulation of the idea and ideals of what is distinct about Christian higher education is much needed. From my experience, many students, many faculty, and even many (most?) administrators don’t have a cogent or cohesive understanding of what Christian education means. I made the assumption that this book would be written to academics to fill this need.

What it was instead was a freshman connections textbook. Maybe that’s okay. Many Christian colleges (mine included) have an “Intro to College” course that freshman take their first semester with a goal of introducing them to the philosophy and history of higher education in general and their own institution in particular. This book seems pretty clearly to have been written for such a course. Ream and Glanzer use scripture, history, and the words of scholars both historical and contemporary to argue that Christian education is unique in its (ideally) holistic approach with the goal of forming complete individuals who love God and love learning. This is, they claim, in contradistinction to secular universities in which learning has no true goal or telos beyond career preparation or the propagation of particular academic disciplines. They argue that against the fragmentation and individualistic ethos of the modern university, the Christian university has a distinct and separate mission with the classical understanding that all knowledge must hold together and find its completion in knowledge of God. They also briefly introduce students to the work of Christian scholars like Noll, Polkinghorne, and Hauerwas.

There wasn’t much I disagreed with in this book. Ream and Glanzer are consciously building on the work of Arthur Holmes, who is quoted throughout. I have not yet read Holmes’s 1987 study, but according to the authors that work focused on a Christian college in the traditional liberal arts sense: a place where knowledge is passed along but not where new knowledge is necessarily created. Because of the rise of Christian research universities in recent years, the authors believe it is time for Christian institutions to give more mind to the creation of knowledge and the conduct of research in a Christian context. Here they seem to be following the likes of Marsden and Noll in arguing for an evangelical life of the mind and love of learning. (Note: though the language is inclusive and we’re treated to a summary of the rise of medieval universities in a Catholic setting, the book is definitely written from an evangelical perspective.)

My major complaint with the book was its delivery. I had hoped it would be a good book for a faculty discussion group to provide an avenue into some of the key topics Ream and Glanzer emphasize: in particular, the challenge of holistic education in the face of pressures toward technical or vocational training. I quickly realized academics were not the intended audience. With the “college life” vignettes beginning each chapter and the concluding discussion questions, this is a freshman college text. A good one, maybe. I’d have to try it out with a class to be sure. But a challenging and insightful text for college faculty and administrators? Not so much.

Life of Pi

Leave a reply

Life of PiLife of Pi by Yann Martel

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sometimes I think a good author simply comes up with an incredible situation and then writes to see how the characters respond to it, what they do, how they eventually get out of it. In this case the situation is a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific with a tiger aboard. Pi is the only human survivor of a sunken ship, which was carrying his family and a small menagerie to a new life in Canada. After the accident he finds himself on the ship with the tiger, a hyena, a zebra, and an orangutan– and very soon with only a tiger.

So much you can learn from the back cover. What the back cover (at least the back cover of my edition) doesn’t mention is the twist at the end that casts the entire story into a new, more sinister light. It’s a twist worthy of a Gene Wolfe novel, the hook that makes you flip back through the pages, wondering how much of what you read you really understood, whether you are even now interpreting the signs correctly. Without that twist, it would have been an interesting and compelling novel. It would have been beautiful even. But it would not have been haunting. You would not wake up in the middle of the night thinking about the novel, uneasily considering the stories Pi told.

The novel is broken up into three main sections. The first talks about Pi’s life growing up in India. This portion of the story is told as though the author is interviewing Pi years after his ordeal, though at this point we’re still not sure what that ordeal is. Only that it is a story that will “make us believe in God.” Pi certainly believes in God. His enthusiasm for God leads him to actively pursue and practice three faiths, that of Christianity, Islam, and his native Hinduism, much to his parents’ perplexity. We also learn a lot about zoo-keeping here, as this is where Pi grows up, the son of a zookeeper in Pondicherry. Martel gives us lots to think about regarding our relationship with animals and the subtle, complex, and nuanced universe that is a zoo.

The second and longer portion of the work is Pi’s story about what happened in the lifeboat, how him and the tiger (named Richard Parker) survived their several-month ordeal. We already know the story is going to have a happy ending. (Remember, Martel is telling this as though getting it all from Pi himself, now married and with children and living in Toronto.) Our universe telescope’s down to Pi’s lifeboat, the day-to-day details of surviving at sea and living in close proximity to a Bengal tiger who is always hungry. This is where all the background regarding animals and zoo-keeping comes in handy. The book fits together well in that respect.

It doesn’t fit together as well regarding all the background we got about Pi’s religious faith in the first section of the story. The zoo-keeping stuff blended with survival at sea with the tiger. I kept waiting for Pi’s faith to likewise come into play in some deep existential way during his time on the ocean, but it never happened. Pi was simply there, with God, surviving. No epiphanies or visitations. No deep meaning welling up from his ecumenical perspectives on Vishnu, Jesus, and Muhammed. That’s fine, I just felt the first portion of the book was setting us up for something along those lines.

The third and by far shortest portion of the book was Pi’s interview with two Japanese officials who came to find out what he could tell them regarding the shipping accident. This is where the book twisted, where it showed a hidden depth I had not expected. Up until this point it was an enjoyable, imaginative novel with great description, a clever situation, and splashes of lovely surreality (because the Pacific, after all, is a huge and fairly unknown place to be drifting across). But the details of the story Pi tells are too fantastic, too unbelievable to these polite Japanese officials. Pi says some things about faith, about what we chose to believe.

And then he tells another story.

Perhaps this is the point of the book, the crux of the story that “will make us believe in God.” Because– and I don’t want to give too much away here– there are multiple ways to understand what actually happened to Pi while he was at sea. Pi asks the Japanese officials which story they think is better, which one they choose to believe. Pi knows what happened though, while his hearers have to make a decision. I’m not sure the analogy is perfect here, but in some sense this is us with life. We know what happened. We see (at least pieces of) the complex system of cause and effect we’re snarled within. Crazy, random, maddening, and sickening things happen. But we have to decide what story to believe– a story of chaos and meaninglessness or a story of significance.

This is a story that will make you believe in God, he said. I’m not sure it did. Maybe Martel is just telling us an excellent story about a boy and a tiger (and an ocean and a cannibalistic castaway and a carnivorous island and a tiny zoo in India). But maybe he’s also telling us a story about how life works and how we choose which stories to believe.