BEATRICE AND VIRGIL

DA NY TIMES.COM
Books of The Times
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: April 12, 2010
Yann Martel’s 2001 novel, “Life of Pi,” was a charming, eccentric fable — part philosophical meditation on God, part children’s adventure story about a boy’s voyage across the ocean on a lifeboat with a tiger named Richard Parker.

BEATRICE AND VIRGIL
By Yann Martel
197 pages. Spiegel & Grau. $24.

Mr. Martel’s new book, “Beatrice and Virgil,” unfortunately, is every bit as misconceived and offensive as his earlier book was fetching. It, too, features animals as central characters. It, too, involves a figure who in some respects resembles the author. It, too, is written in deceptively light, casual prose.

Meant as a kind of “Animal Farm”-like parable, this book reads as an allegory about the Holocaust in which the tragic fate of the title characters — a donkey named Beatrice and a monkey named Virgil, who are stuffed animals in a taxidermy shop — is seen “through the tragic fate of Jews.”

Mr. Martel tries to distance himself a bit from this narrative strategy by attributing the story of Beatrice and Virgil to an amateur playwright, who mourns the dying of animal species around the world and who may actually have been a Nazi collaborator. Nonetheless, his story has the effect of trivializing the Holocaust, using it as a metaphor to evoke “the extermination of animal life” and the suffering of “doomed creatures” who “could not speak for themselves.”

The reader is encouraged to see the stuffed animals Beatrice and Virgil — who have endured torture, starvation and humiliation — as stand-ins for the Jews, and to equate the terrible things they’ve witnessed — referred to as “the Horrors” — to the atrocities committed by the Nazis.

Like “Pi,” this novel begins with a framing story involving a Martel-like personage — this time a writer named Henry, who is famous for being the author of a prizewinning best seller featuring wild animals. Henry, we’re told, has spent five years working on a new book. It’s a book that addresses the subject of the Holocaust in two parts: the first is an essay that discusses the Holocaust’s representation in fiction and its resistance to metaphor; the second part is a novel about the same subject.

Modern wars, Henry reasons, “have killed tens of millions of people and devastated entire countries, yet representations that convey the real nature of war have to jostle to be seen, heard and read amidst the war thrillers, the war comedies, the war romances, the war science fictions, the war propaganda.”

Why, he wonders, has “such poetic license” so rarely been taken with the Holocaust?

When Henry’s manuscript meets resistance from his editors and from booksellers, he tries to explain the project. “If history doesn’t become story,” he says, “it dies to everyone except the historian. Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine.” No one buys Henry’s argument, and he soon decides that his book is a “complete, unpublishable failure.”

Henry and his wife move from Canada to one of the “great cities of the world” — maybe New York, maybe Paris, maybe Berlin. Mr. Martel is purposely vague on the subject. Since Henry doesn’t seem to need to find a paying job, he takes clarinet lessons, joins an amateur theater group, hangs out in a chocolateria. One day he receives an envelope containing a copy of the Flaubert story “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator,” about a young man named Julian who takes delight in killing animals; Julian fulfills a curse that he will murder his parents but is later redeemed by helping a leper, who may be Jesus Christ in disguise. Accompanying the Flaubert story are some pages from a play by the letter writer himself, along with a request for Henry’s help.

Henry tracks down the letter writer, who turns out to be an elderly, taciturn taxidermist — also named Henry. The taxidermist shows Henry around his shop, and introduces him to two of the many stuffed animals in the store: Beatrice, an amiable-looking donkey, and Virgil, a monkey who is perched on her back.

The two creatures, says the taxidermist, referring to Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” are his “guides through hell.” They are also the main characters in his play. After the taxidermist reads some excerpts from his play aloud, Henry says that he realizes that the amateur playwright has done exactly what he, Henry, “had argued should be done in his rejected book”: he “was representing the Holocaust differently.”

The taxidermist’s play, readers will quickly see, bears a marked resemblance to Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” It’s set on a country road, near a tree, and its two main characters talk about themselves, their sufferings and ways to pass the time.

“Beatrice: What should we do?

“Virgil: Is there anything we can do?

“Beatrice (looking up the road): We could move on.

“Virgil: We’ve done that before and it didn’t get us anywhere.

“Beatrice: Maybe this time it will.

“Virgil: Maybe.

(They do not move.)

“Virgil: We could just talk.

“Beatrice: Talk won’t save us.

“Virgil: But it’s better than silence.

(Silence.)” Though Virgil and Beatrice are sweetly engaging characters, the play in which they appear remains a derivative recycling of Beckett, and Mr. Martel’s efforts to turn their tale into a kind of philosophical meditation on the Holocaust result in a botched and at times cringe-making fable — a far cry, indeed, from what, say, Art Spiegelman achieved in “Maus,” his 1986 graphic novel, which in depicting Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats did not diminish the event, but instead goaded the reader into looking at the Holocaust anew.

When “Pi” won the Man Booker Prize in 2002, there was considerable talk that the novel’s plot echoed that of a novel by the Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar titled “Max and the Cats,” which recounted the story of a youth who leaves Nazi Germany and ends up in a small boat with a jaguar on the way to Brazil. Mr. Martel had indirectly acknowledged his debt in an author’s note, in which he thanked Mr. Scliar for “the spark of life,” but while he seems to have borrowed the Brazilian writer’s premise, he turned that idea into a very different and original work of his own.

This time, his borrowings from — or, at best, homage to — Beckett go well beyond a simple premise, and they serve no persuasive end. Rather they are another awkward element in this disappointing and often perverse novel.