This Martel Coil
The Booker-winning, seven million selling Life Of Pi was a bona fide publishing phenomeon. Nine years after it was written, Yann Martel has delivered another animal allegory, this time exploring the horrors of the Holocaust.
Peter Murphy, 15 Jun 2010
Beatrice & Virgil is a short novel, but a complex one. The excerpts from the taxidermist's play are fragmented and haunting, and the book's closing sequence 'Games For Gustav' is akin to some satanic truth or dare game show. Indeed, the book's big ideas seem even bigger when compressed into 166 pages.
"This is a very good point," Martel says, "'cos in the first incarnation, it was going to be a novel in the form of a play about a monkey and a donkey and a large shirt, and it didn't work, it simply did not work. And so then I thought of using the taxidermist, and that gave me a measure of distance, and I fragmented the play, which also suited my purpose symbolically, 'cos in a sense that's what we get from the Holocaust.
"If you go to Auschwitz where the showers were, people would be killed and their stuff would be sorted through and dispersed to Germany, so in the last days before the camp was closed you had what was left of the last victims, their suitcases full of photographs, jewelry, watches, clothes. You had these walls of photographs of complete unknowns, various Jewish families from all across Europe, and it's incredibly powerful to have these pictures of couples, children, grandparents. And precisely because they're fragmentary it lets you fill out the rest of these lives. So I realised getting fragments of this play was in fact more effective."
Beatrice & Virgil is in parts a chilling book, not least because the taxidermist's rationale for his profession is a seductive one. He is not responsible for the deaths of the animals, he says, merely the display. He's just following orders.
"Well, I think few of us want to take responsibility for what we do, and the Nazis are a perfect example," Martel contends. "It's amazing that this thing which involved an entire state beaurocracy, with a lot of active participants and a great many passive participants, was reduced in the end to a trial of... Nuremberg was I think 24 people. There were dozens of local trials of course, but essentially it was a few hundred, maybe thousands of people. And of course everyone at Nuremberg was always saying, 'I was just following orders', right up to Goebbels. To them the only culprit was Hitler, one single man accounting for the whole drama. So we always want to abdicate responsibility, which is another reason why I didn't place the drama in a known city, I didn't say it's Berlin or Paris or New York. It could be Dublin, or Saskatchewan where I live.
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Peter Murphy
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