On animals in Yann Martel's novels
The Canadian writer Yann Martel has a signature touch: an affinity for the animal, human and nonhuman, across his many stories. I've recently finished his latest book Son of Nobody , a deepfake of a Greek epic that leaves me equally grieving its end and delighted by its waves of writerly force. The tip-off that this is the voice of Martel and not his protagonist persona, who I find untrustworthy, but maybe that's just a bias from scholarly authority weighed against him, is found in the allusions to giraffes, wildebeests, elephants, and chameleons scattered through the Greek translation. These are figures who have come up elsewhere in the Martelian canon. His most-lauded book, Life of Pi , features a tiger among other larger-than-human characters. Beatrice and Virgil follows the eponymous donkey and monkey through a strange allegorical tale. And monkeys, refigured and real, appear again in his multigenerational novel The High Mountains of Portugal . Martel's fourth and most...