This Martel Coil

B
eatrice & Virgil is Spanish-born Canadian author Yann Martel's first novel since the seven-million selling Booker-winning Life Of Pi (soon due to be filmed in 3D by Ang Lee). Holocaust allegory, meat-is-murder meditation, and also a semi-autobiographical riff on the author's struggle to find a form for his story, it tells the tale of a writer, Henry, who after life-changing success sees his five-years-in-the-making follow-up subjected to rejection from editors and booksellers alike. In the ensuing crisis of confidence, he moves to a new city and forsakes all thoughts of writing, until he receives by post fragments of a play written by a rather sinister taxidermist.

As late as 2007, at a reading he gave at the Canadian Embassy in Dalkey, Martel was still speaking of Beatrice and Virgil as a flip-book: half historical essay, half fiction. That vision of the book never made it to print, and Martel has obviously co-opted his experience of the hard-nosed realities of publishing world into the new novel, although the result is more akin to Borges (and occasionally Beckett) than the metafictionalists. Beatrice & Virgil is in some ways the surviving twin who tells the story of the sibling that never made it. Not only does it convey the themes of its original conception – at one remove – but it also depicts the process of an idea struggling to find its correct incarnation, a spirit looking for a body to inhabit.
"For years I'd been trying to find an 'in', so the character's difficulty in trying to tell the story is mine," Martel admits over tea in the Merrion Hotel. "I did write this essay, it took two and a half years and nothing's come of it. It's lying there somewhere and nobody wants to publish it – as a flip-book anyway. So that's true in an autobiographical way, but it also suits my more philosophical purpose, which is, 'How do we speak about the Holocaust?'
"I'm not Jewish or of German or Polish or Hungarian descent, so obviously I couldn't tell a realistic novel about a Jew in Poland, it's been done hundreds of times, and often very, very well, so to try to replicate an experience that is not mine made no sense. Other ways needed to be found, and it's difficult, and I liked including that. My own life is not interesting, it's more that it suited my purpose, symbolically, to say, 'Even talking about the Holocaust in a non-traditional way is very difficult, and an example is this flip-book idea that didn't work.'"
Beatrice & Virgil is a short novel, but a complex one. The excerpts from the taxidermist's play are fragmented and haunting, and the book's closing sequence 'Games For Gustav' is akin to some satanic truth or dare game show. Indeed, the book's big ideas seem even bigger when compressed into 166 pages.
"This is a very good point," Martel says, "'cos in the first incarnation, it was going to be a novel in the form of a play about a monkey and a donkey and a large shirt, and it didn't work, it simply did not work. And so then I thought of using the taxidermist, and that gave me a measure of distance, and I fragmented the play, which also suited my purpose symbolically, 'cos in a sense that's what we get from the Holocaust.
"If you go to Auschwitz where the showers were, people would be killed and their stuff would be sorted through and dispersed to Germany, so in the last days before the camp was closed you had what was left of the last victims, their suitcases full of photographs, jewelry, watches, clothes. You had these walls of photographs of complete unknowns, various Jewish families from all across Europe, and it's incredibly powerful to have these pictures of couples, children, grandparents. And precisely because they're fragmentary it lets you fill out the rest of these lives. So I realised getting fragments of this play was in fact more effective."
Beatrice & Virgil is in parts a chilling book, not least because the taxidermist's rationale for his profession is a seductive one. He is not responsible for the deaths of the animals, he says, merely the display. He's just following orders.
"Well, I think few of us want to take responsibility for what we do, and the Nazis are a perfect example," Martel contends. "It's amazing that this thing which involved an entire state beaurocracy, with a lot of active participants and a great many passive participants, was reduced in the end to a trial of... Nuremberg was I think 24 people. There were dozens of local trials of course, but essentially it was a few hundred, maybe thousands of people. And of course everyone at Nuremberg was always saying, 'I was just following orders', right up to Goebbels. To them the only culprit was Hitler, one single man accounting for the whole drama. So we always want to abdicate responsibility, which is another reason why I didn't place the drama in a known city, I didn't say it's Berlin or Paris or New York. It could be Dublin, or Saskatchewan where I live.
"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."