Book Interview: The Ascent of Yann Martel

"To me, suffering is the starting point of thoughtfulness," declares Canadian author Yann Martel. "If nothing happens to you, there's no need to be thoughtful. There's no reason to grow, to evolve, to change, to become wiser. Wisdom starts with adversity so that's my starting point for nearly everything I write."
There's certainly no shortage of grief, adversity and suffering in Martel's latest novel, The High Mountains Of Portugal, yet another faith-based work which comprises three surreal, cleverly interlinked novellas, each set several decades apart in the titular country.
"In this book, each section starts with someone losing somebody close to them and what I'm interested in is where they go from there. What tools do they have? What do they do with that suffering?"
Visiting Dublin midway through a month-long book tour, the 52-year-old is sitting with Hot Press in an executive suite in Brook's Hotel. A mannerly, bespectacled and somewhat intense man, Martel speaks in a clipped internationalist accent that reflects his peripatetic upbringing.
While he writes incredibly elegantly, English isn't actually his first language. The son of French-speaking Quebeckers, he was born in Salamanca, Spain, in 1963. His father was a diplomat for the Canadian government, and the family lived in Costa Rica, France, Mexico, Alaska and Canada at various times.
"My upbringing was totally privileged," he admits. "My parents are diplomats, we moved around, good schools."
Now living in Saskatchewan, Canada, with his wife (the British writer Alice Kuipers) and their four young children, he says he doesn't really know how influential all of that moving around in his childhood was on his decision to become a writer.
"It certainly helps in that it shows you that there are different ways to be. The planet is like a big book with different chapters, different characters, so it was certainly very stimulating for me. Was it essential? I don't know.
"Would I have become a writer if I hadn't travelled so much?" he continues. "I'm not sure. You become a writer because you read and I suppose travelling is a form of reading. So it did nourish me a lot, that's for sure. I don't know if it was essential, but it did nourish my fiction."
The High Mountains Of Portugal is his fourth novel, and his second since 2001's Booker-winning Life Of Pi. A staggering success by any standards, that book - a fantasy about a boy trapped on a lifeboat with a tiger - sold in excess of ten million copies and was turned into a hit Hollywood movie by Ang Lee in 2012. His third novel, 2010's Beatrice And Virgil, was another allegorical tale about the Holocaust, featuring two talking stuffed animals as main protagonists.
With a track record like that, did he feel much pressure when writing High Mountains?
"Not as much as you'd think, in the sense that there's no formula," he avers, waving a hand. "It's not like, 'I've got a good formula so I'll keep it going.' Pi was a freak success. I was startled and delighted by it. I'm still grateful for the success and for every person who loves it and writes and talks to me about it, but I don't want to reproduce it because I didn't know what I was doing then so how could I reproduce it?
"It thrilled me and I was very happy with Life Of Pi and that millions of people liked it too. But I also like Beatrice And Virgil. It engaged me just as much. And it had much more mixed reviews."
That's putting it mildly. While his reported $3m publishing advance undoubtedly softened the blow, for the most part Beatrice And Virgil was critically savaged.
"It was definitely more controversial," he concedes. "I don't mind controversy. One did very well, one did less well. I'm still happy with them. They're like children, I love all my children. Same with this one. Seems to be starting well, but we'll see how it fares."
Bad reviews don't particularly bother him anyway.
"You don't like bad reviews but at some point you just let go of it... and when you let go of it, it's better. Writing is art and you give art, so it doesn't matter what the person does with it. If you're really giving, you're giving. What they do with it is their own affair."
Always fond of combining theology with zoology in his fiction, the novellas in High Mountains all feature a chimpanzee as a symbol for Jesus Christ. Martel has a pet dog, but maintains that he isn't actually as into animals in real life as he is in using them in his work.
"We just got him recently," he says. "It was for the kids, not for my writing. We figured pets and children go well together so we have a little Havanese, which is only like 12 pounds. In that way I love animals, but as reflected in my writing, no, not as much as you would think. I use them as literary devices.
"Animals are really good storytelling devices because we tend to view wild animals with a sense of wonder. Look at them with wonder and that's a great thing for a character. Give people a character with a sense of wonder and they're going to keep on reading. We are cynical about our own species so I use animals for technical reasons. Also, they echo nicely my religious themes and religions are full of animals. The Garden of Eden was full of animals. The Old Testament itself is full of animals. I find animals lend themselves to religious stories."
Does he believe in God?
"Yes, I do," he nods. "Not in a denominational, dogmatic way, but I choose to believe that there's more than just this reality. That underpinning this material chemical reality there's something else. I have no proofs for it, no one does. It's called faith for that reason. It's not something you can verify despite claims of miracles and all that. There are never irrefutable, otherwise they wouldn't be faith, it would be evidence."
He picks a coffee spoon up off the table and drops it down again.
"There! Nobody disbelieves gravity, gravity exists, end of discussion. Religion can't be like that because then it would take away our freedom of will. To be good you have to know about evil, so if you're going to believe in God, you have to be able to disbelieve in God."
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The High Mountains of Portugal is published by Canongate