Beatrice and Virgil

Yann Martel

He has another one that morning, while Beatrice is still sleeping. Virgil remembers how their miseries started. Started in his mind, that is, the moment when he realized what was happening to them. He acts it out. He's reading his morning paper at his favorite cafe and his eyes are drawn to one of the headlines. The headline announces a government edict concerning new categories of citizens--or rather, as the article makes clear, a category of citizens and a new category of non-citizens. Virgil reads with increasing astonishment as he realizes that he--he himself personally, in all his specific details, this monkey sitting in a cafe reading a paper, such an ordinary thing--is the exact and intended target.

Yann Martel writes with burning realizations. I've read three works by him now, and in all of them, the reader is exposed to a slow welling into sudden realization of some awfulness. It's not as simple as saying he uses twists or a gimmick in every novel, although one wonders if he hasn't trapped himself with the fame of his famous twist. Martel's burning realizations are like strings holding back sharp blades while candles are placed to burn through them. You get a sense of what is going to happen, sometimes a very detailed and clear sense, but it's nothing compared to the sudden whoosh of the blade swinging down.

When I started Beatrice and Virgil, I worried that it was going to be Life of Pi all over again. A story of animals signifying things too horrible to tell factually, things that required the truth more than they required the facts, and of course, I also worried that there would be a twist at the end--that sudden jerking away of the screen that shows everything in a new light. But, and this is the but you will be happy to hear, it is not the case.

Beatrice and Virgil is an adequate continuation of Martel's work. He doesn't try to do Life of Pi over again, he writes a novel knowing that he has written that famous novel, and he resists making the spectacle of this the awesome spectacle of that.

Interestingly, there still may be a giant shocking twist in this novel. But it is only revealed by the cover. If you remember that most of what Martel writes confuses fact and fiction, confuses stories and history--in fact most of what he writes suggests that everything is story--and if you remember this, his calling Beatrice and Virgil a novel is very interesting. It's a story about an author who wrote a very famous book and then didn't really write any others. The author is from Canada. The author wrote a book that had animals in it. The author has a son named Theo. The author moved to a new city after he couldn't write any more. A good question to ask is can a biography be turned into fiction by calling it a novel?



Note
Criticism is not figuring out what the author intended or the meaning a reader can take from a work; criticism is writing a new book. Each reader reads a thing the author never could have written. In fact, each reader can actually be said to write a new book. When we make connections or see images, feel emotions and imagine characters, we are not playing a game where we try to align ourselves as closely as possible with what was happening in the author's head as he traced his words on the page. No, we are performing an equally creative act. Unless criticism is seen as a creative act, it will be empty. Criticism is not reactive, it is creative. More than this, criticism is creation.