Yann Martel pens three-part parable
Saskatoon author Yann Martel returns with his latest novel, and because he won the Booker Prize in 2002 for Life of Pi, the release now of The High Mountains of Portugal is necessarily an event. I don’t know how a writer lives up to event status every time he or she takes on a new work — this book is simply very good.
The novel has three sections, and in the middle section a woman comes to a pathologist’s office in Braganca, Portugal. She wants Dr. Eusebio Lozora to perform an autopsy on her dead husband. When the doctor asks after the body, the woman from up in the mountain country simply indicates her suitcase. Sure enough, curled up inside is her husband. “I want to know how he lived,” she declares. The doctor thinks, “She means how he died.” But that’s not what she means, at all.
Years ago, the couple has a boy who was much loved. But he died in very mysterious circumstances, and the church, back at the turn of the century, offered a faith-based explanation, which the husband agreed with and the wife did not. Now, she wants this pathologist, in the middle of the night, to cut her dead husband open, and tell her, not what he died of, but how, with the incredible loss they suffered, he was able to live. And that’s what this novel is about: living, or not, with grief.
Because Martel has such a catholic range of interests, his meditation on grief is couched in two adventure stories, a fairly well-trodden sermon on metaphors in the gospels, but which makes strategic sense in hindsight and which is cleverly dovetailed into a lecture on Agatha Christie’s novels, as well as some bristling talk about colonialism and slavery. There’s also plenty about humans living closely with animals. But always, whether it’s through a wild road trip with a man who’s never driven a car past people who have never seen one or a pathologist finding a baby bear and a flute inside a dead man, we are looking straight on or sideways at grief.
How do you live with it? Do you take a few days off, work all night, quit entirely and buy an ape, put your husband in a suitcase, or stop to watch the water go by, “the difficult animal skill of doing nothing.”
In a world of marvels, death is the inevitable conclusion and Martel looks right through those marvels he creates into the nagging answer no one wants to question. Each of these sections moves well in its own right, then complements the other in a classic storytelling finale. And the ending is a gift of gentle white light.