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 audacious novel-length work makes fun of his own tendency to write a menagerie into the story. As scholar Harlow Donne, the author himself questions each appearance of a far-off animal in the original text he purports to find. The diligent commentator points out repeated instances of the word for "chameleon" (191) and then has a moment of analytical reflection, "What's with all the chameleons?" But then the tone turns: "I can see one in a storm, clinging to a branch, trying to survive, its soft skin blinking a kaleidoscope of colours, its eyes gyrating wildly." (247) The chameleon is given its own moment, but -- in harmony with the direct imagery of this story -- the observational moment comes to reflect, loop-like, on each other character.

A tentative answer to Martel's own question, "what's with all the chameleons?" Perhaps the author finds the chameleon as a noble herald for his own shapeshifting movement. Not just for the creature's color-changing capacity, but also the eyes, each independently mobile; and the small frame, too, susceptible to its surroundings and the predatory powers around it. The themes dancing across Martel's repertoire include wily adaptation to difficult displacements -- or maybe better to say kidnappings by fate and cruelty. Not one of Martel's principle characters are unsympathetic to my mind, because they become changed by the encounter; they are always looking around just as they are about to drown. 

The reader may be unsatisfied by Martel's work for the many levels of ambiguity it leaves. Unanswered questions abound, gaps that must be bridged by the imagination, though the ending of Life of Pi and the meta-text of Son of Nobody, especially, are impossible to resolve. The unassailable gap between possibility and reality that this leaves is the precondition for subjective slippage into the other, the non-human other, that Martel offers as a side narrative. Until we realize that this auxiliary detail is the entire point. 

A small spoiler here. There is a dead body in Son of Nobody: a treasured love, deceased. Harlow Donne confesses, "The more I looked at your sweet little face, the more mottled your complexion appeared... and the more I beheld universal demise" (322). The wave of epic poetry seeps into the footnotes and carries this personal line into the epic register. A single moment of a body in front of a body exceeds itself and eats past-present-future, consumes difference. The personal story prepares us to meet Hades and the suspicious foundation of all western myth.

But to get there, we need to have been already surprised by the existence of difference: the scale of diversity that is then condensed by death itself. Martel does not limit himself to the human story, but draws in humans looking at animals, and how animals may look back at humans. Christ as an ape. Terror as a tiger. The Holocaust observed in the antics of a howler monkey and a donkey. Not to mention the possibility that elephants tore down the walls of Troy, and that the Greeks cannibalized their own men during ten long years of siege warfare. 

Martel's works don't have the showy and satisfactory structure of other reinterpretations of history. The author shows and hides himself through animal masks. Putting on one, then the other, in various combinations has resulted in the radically different forms of each of his novel-length works. If Life of Pi switched the masks at the end of the tale, leaving the reader on unstable ground, then Son of Nobody uses the mask of the human like a sustain pedal, lofting his impressive genre-work over several hundred pages without the reader realizing until too late that the human mask was animal all along, and that behind the mask is another mask, that of mythical death himself. What mask down there awaits its end?