Martel’s latest lives up to lofty expectations

Canadian author Yann Martel returns with his latest novel, and because he won the Booker Prize for Life of Pi in 2002, the release now of The High Mountains of Portugal is necessarily an event. And it is simply very good.

The novel has three sections. The first tells of a young man escaping sorrow by driving his father’s car to a remote mountain village in search of a Christian relic. The second tells of a woman’s inquiry into her dead husband’s life — she arrives at the office of a pathologist with his body in a suitcase. The third tells of a Canadian senator grieving over the loss of his wife who buys a chimpanzee from an animal sanctuary and returns to the village of his childhood.

All of which sounds simple, but Martel interweaves them into a complex narrative. The village forms a linking element, spanning decades, with undertones of faith, philosophy, death and living — or not — grief.

Through the course of the three narratives, two children, a father and a beloved wife die. How the various characters deal with that death is a central theme of the novel.

The second section has the pathologist first listening to a long disquisition from his wife on the subject of Christ’s miracles before she then compares the gospels’ story of Christ with the basic narrative structure of an Agatha Christie’s novel.

The third section has some wonderfully enlightened moments, in which both the local villagers and the senator become comfortable being around an animal that mostly acts very much like them, only more peacefully and mindfully so.

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 the 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, hardly a surprise from a writer who once put a young man in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger.

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 that he has created 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. The High Mountains of Portugal Yann Martel Knopf Canada