Author:  Yann Martel
Title:  Beatrice and Virgil
Publisher:  Spiegel & Grau

Yann Martel, the acclaimed author of Life of Pi, begins his new novel almost autobiographically. He describes the life of an author named Henry who had written an extremely popular, award-winning book using animals as metaphors. In setting the stage for Henry's story you wonder how much of Martel's own thoughts, feelings, and experiences have been put to paper. He even names Henry's boy after his own son, Theo. It is a literary technique that makes this story personal.

Henry's spent years creating his second novel, a flip-flop book—essay on one side, fiction on the other—both bound in the same cover and meeting halfway in the middle. It was creative, but lacked the heartwarming, faith-inspiring allegory of his first novel. His publishers dislike the manuscript, not just because of the difficulty in marketing a flip-flop book (do they stock it in fiction or nonfiction?), but because the story focused on the Holocaust.

Henry believes that the Holocaust had been preserved mostly in one dimension—historical realism. What he felt was missing was any significant fiction written about the great horror—any artful metaphors or poetic license. His reception from his editors suggested that the publishing world wasn't ready for these stories and Henry, unhappily, puts the project to rest.

The setback disrupts Henry's writing and he takes to other forms of artful expression until he meets with an old taxidermist who has been working on a screenplay. The taxidermist (strangely also named Henry) has created two characters, a donkey named Beatrice and a howling monkey named Virgil that are on their own journey of heaven and hell, much like their namesakes from Dante's Inferno. The two Henrys begin a strange collaboration to fill in the missing elements of the play.

Martel is at his best when he is writing the descriptions of Virgil from Beatrice's perspective, Beatrice's from Virgil's, and their ongoing dialog. The humanity in their relationship is emphasized in a way that might not be as possible or believable between two people. But since Martel is painting on a canvas not as familiar to the readers (via the animals) it provides him the media with which to powerfully portray his message. It makes his point that narrative represents truth in a different way than facts do; maybe even more important for passing along what we have learned.

Heaven is expressed in an impressive eight-page dialog as Virgil describes a pear to Beatrice—the shape, the color, the feel, the smell, and the taste are exhausted in a beautiful exchange between the monkey, who starts by longingly saying, "What I'd give for a pear" to the donkey who has never seen one. Not only does the reader gain a revelation of the glory of a single, golden pear, but also for the depth of relationship between the two characters. When at the end of the description Beatrice echoes back sadly to Virgil, "I wish you had a pear," Virgil responds from his heart, "And if I had one, I would give it to you."

But ultimately, Martel's tale is what Henry set out to write, and what the taxidermist's play is about—the Holocaust. And though there are hints of the tragedy within the story and exposed in the play, when the genocide is revealed it shocks the reader and leaves them standing like they are right outside one of the death camps. All of a sudden sharing a lifeboat with a wild tiger seems the safer of Martel's stories.

I'll be surprised if Beatrice and Virgil becomes the popular high school classroom read that Life of Pi has become these past few years. But the point of this book isn't to be popular; it is a reminder shared so that we should never forget—and the donkey and the monkey tell that story horrifically well.


**This review first published on April 26, 2010.