In late-2007, five years after he won the Booker Prize for Life of Pi, Yann Martel started talking about his next book. The structurally unconventional A 20th Century Shirt, he explained, would be divided into two separate parts and published as a “flip-book,” with each half reading inward from its own cover. One would be a long critical essay, the other a made-up story featuring a talking donkey and monkey who lived on a shirt; both would be about the Holocaust, with the non-fiction piece tackling how it has been rendered in literature, and the fictional half offering a “non-historical” antidote to that dominant social-realist, documentary mode of representation.
Three years later, here is that book, half cultural criticism, half allegorical fable. Except it's got a different title, isn't explicitly either of those things, and the whole flip-book idea seems to have been thrown out the window. There are ruminations on how the Holocaust has been aestheticized and commemorated through writing, but if the book is about the Holocaust, it focuses more on what the Holocaust represents than how it is represented – and then only tangentially. So what is Beatrice & Virgil about?
Beatrice & Virgil, by Yann Martel, Knopf Canada, 213 pages, $29.95
This is a tough question of such a complex and nuanced book, and one that's all but discredited, with a metafictive nod, in an early scene. The novel's protagonist, Henry D'Hôte, a famous author whose previous, internationally successful novel featured anthropomorphized animals, has just finished a follow-up, half-non-fiction, half-fiction flip-book on – you guessed it – the Holocaust. But Henry's inventiveness is also his undoing: At a London Book Fair meeting, from a “firing squad” of publishing-industry figures, come critiques – ”the novel lacks drive and the essay lacks unity” – and, of the unpublishable manuscript's general ambiguity, outright challenges: “What's your book about?” Henry is flummoxed: What is his book about?
Ultimately, what is any novel “about”? As Henry himself explains, at some level, every good novel is about truth. (Beatrice & Virgil, for example, not only unearths truths of its own, but examines how truth is buried in the muck of history, and how art and imagination are often the best means of digging it out.) But being told that the flip-book “goes beyond the garland of facts” isn't the sort of snappy, succinct tagline that the editors, bookseller and historian present at the book fair meeting want to hear, and so Henry leaves with his manuscript orphaned and his literary career cast adrift.
[Stillness] is the quality that Martel believes the best literature can inspire in readers
Soured and disillusioned, Henry abandons writing and moves with his wife to an unnamed foreign city – “Perhaps it was New York … Paris … Berlin” – where he takes music lessons, joins an amateur theatre troupe and works part-time at a chocolate shop. We discover more similarities between the novel's protagonist and its author (like Martel, Henry is “the son of roving Canadian foreign service officers”) and all these parallels, not to mention the vitriolic satire of the publishing chumps who axed Henry's book, suggest that something else is going on: Might Yann Martel actually have had his own flip-book canned? Is Beatrice & Virgil the roman-à-clef result?
While Life of Pi blurred and complicated the divisions between fact and fiction, Beatrice & Virgil offers an even deeper exploration of what's “real” and what's not. In a recent interview, Martel explained his decision to conflate his own life with Henry's: “People find autobiography has credibility; it pulls them in.” Here the device is so convincing that one has to remind oneself that the novel is fiction – which, with a step back, begs an engaging question: What if Yann Martel were never writing a book called A 20th-Century Shirt? What if his 2007 spoilers were, in fact, an extra-textual prologue to the book he was actually working on all along, the book we now have in our hands? Either way, the potential for such speculations speaks to Beatrice & Virgil's capacity to expand beyond its pages, and to the terrain – the reader's imagination – where its multiple layers unfold.
