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
"Evil isn't set in another country far away," Martel continues. "You today could have rubbed shoulders with someone who is Hitler-like, who right now is an ordinary man, but maybe in 15 years might be this larger-than-life figure who dominates your life. The Germans, still to this day I think, cannot believe what happened to them. They were the most refined, civilised society in Europe: the music, the art, the science, the mathematics. And suddenly this happened. And if it happened in Germany, why not here, or in Canada, or the US? So that's why I wanted it to be ambiguous.
"Henry the writer finds the taxidermist a bit rude but is drawn by him, and drawn by the play, so he keeps on coming back to him. He never confronts him, just as in many ways the Jews in Germany kept on rationalising, saying, 'It'll get better. We are Germans. My grandfather fought in the first world War. This buffoon will go away.' And then suddenly when things got so bad it was too late. Two thirds of European Jewry were lost. There were nine million Jews in 1933, in 1945 there were three million left. And you think, it's not like Germany's an island, it's in the middle of the continent. They could have fled in any number of directions except east, and yet they couldn't. They were paralysed.
"It's not so much that evil exists," Martel concludes. "We acknowledge that. What is galling is what is done once evil is known. That's true the world over."
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Peter Murphy
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