Yann Martel tries to reflect a truth that goes beyond mere facts, writes Michele Magwood for the Sunday Times
The High Mountains of Portugal
Yann Martel (Penguin Random House)
*****
It is early in the morning in Saskatchewan when I reach Yann Martel and there is an almighty din in the background. Small folk are bellowing, the noise in inverse relation to their size. Martel apologises breathlessly: “I have four children under the age of six.”
He flees to a quiet room and begins to talk about his magnificent new novel The High Mountains of Portugal. 45 minutes later he has barely drawn breath. His words come in a torrent, often damming up, jamming on a thought, an aside, before surging ahead in rapids of exposition. Speciesism, the Old Testament, Agatha Christie, Ptolemaic astronomy and slavery speed past, carried along on the main themes of the book: loss, suffering and faith.
Martel presents the novel in three disparate parts, linking them with repeat notes that echo down generations – a chimpanzee, a dead child, a remote village, a strange custom of walking backwards.
The first story, “Homeless” is set in Lisbon in 1904. A young academic, Tomás, is unmoored by the deaths of his father, his lover and his child in quick succession. “His heart became undone like a bursting cocoon. Emerging from it came no butterfly but a grey moth that settled on the wall of his soul and stirred no further.” Tomás takes to walking backwards, his way of “objecting” to God, and then sets off on a quest to the mythical high mountains of Portugal to find a centuries-old crucifix that he believes will shake the church, for the Christ figure on the cross is an ape.
In the second story, “Homeward”, a pathologist in a small Portuguese town performs a surreal autopsy on the body of a man, brought in by his wife. She wants to know not how he died, but how he lived, specifically how he lived with the death long ago of their young son. Inside his body the pathologist finds a bear cub – the nickname of their son – wrapped in the arms of a chimpanzee, a symbol of Jesus and the faith that kept him going. Martel is a writer of startling imagination, and no more than in this scene where the woman strips down and climbs inside the body of her husband, next to the animals. It is an arresting metaphor for love, for the atavistic impulse to become one with a lover.
“I loved writing that section,” he says. “You have these basic, naked human beings next to each other, inside each other. It’s humanity at its simplest and strongest.”
Finally, in 1981, a Canadian senator is also unmoored by the death of his wife. In his anguish he walks away from his life, adopts a chimpanzee and sets off for Portugal to the village of his ancestors, the village, of course, of the first story, a place where funeral cortèges show respect by walking backwards. In the story – titled “Home” – the senator, by shucking off the trappings of his life and falling in with the rhythm of the animal, becomes somehow distilled. “He notices the chimp is just lying around, in a sense bathing in the river of time, and he aspires to do this, to just be in the present moment, be in this state of grace with this animal. I think our relationship with animals is kind of like a relationship with a god.”
Martel first explored the idea of the animal as divine in the Booker Prize-winning The Life of Pi, about the odyssey of a tiger and a young boy. The High Mountains of Portugal has a similar heightened, fantastical tone and luminous spirituality.
The author does not practise any traditional religion and was raised in a secular home. “My parents replaced Catholicism with art – if we wanted to understand life we would read great novels, look at great paintings, listen to great music, and those are extraordinary tools for understanding the human condition.”
A trip to India after university changed that. “I realised that reason and rationality had become a disease. It scours and scrapes away at things and I felt that I was drying up. I was equating truth with factual truth.” Observing the Indian religions he embraced faith, what he calls magical thinking. “Magical thinking is shared not only by religion but by art, both are preoccupied with a greater truth that goes beyond factual truth.”
For Martel, religion is storytelling. “People who are too reasonable, who have no stories either religious or artful, are deeply miserable people. Science isn’t narrative, it can be reduced to formulas. But religion always tells stories and it’s to do with our nature as a species. We take reality and we weave it into a story, whether it’s a novel or religion. Both reread reality to get to a truth that is more important to us.”
It is time to get on with his day. Martel has no new novel in progress. He is content for now to just be with his children. “They’re like four miniature Russian novels that I’m working on.”
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Book details
- The High Mountains Of Portugal by Yann Martel
EAN: 9781782114710
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