The nature of the beast

Scarfing down a Power Bar at his publisher's office in Toronto, author Yann Martel swears he's jetlagged, but you'd never know it listening to him. Diving into a lengthy discussion of his latest novel, Beatrice & Virgil, the writer exudes energy and passion, sometimes speaking in rapid-fire riffs that suggest his mouth is attempting to keep pace with his agile brain.

'The Holocaust is a big, story-defeating, word-killing kind of event.' Yann Martel

He has good reason to be excited. Beatrice & Virgil is the triumphant followup to the Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi a novel as challenging and thought-provoking as Pi was inspiring and crowd-pleasing. Fans of the 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker in Pi, however, should be forewarned: while Beatrice & Virgil is named for the adorable donkey and howler monkey at the book's centre, this time Martel is using creatures to tell a far more monstrous story.

Beatrice & Virgil begins with an author named Henry, who has achieved international acclaim for a novel featuring animal characters. Henry faces resistance from publishers when he submits his newest work, a "flip book" of back-to-back stories about the Holocaust.

Henry bears more than a passing resemblance to Martel, who admits that the similarities help to lure the reader in.

"When people read something that feels real, true, autobiographical that makes them believe more," he says. Still, he is quick to dismiss any attempts to read Beatrice & Virgil as thinly veiled autobiography. "Some things are true to my life, but that's in a sense merely haphazard. I created this character because Henry struggles with writing, Henry struggles with finding expression. And that struck me as the right kind of struggle. The Holocaust is a big, story-defeating, word-killing kind of event."

Martel hatched the idea for the book in early 2000. His first concept was to write it as two books in one a play exploring the traumatic event through imaginative, fictional means, with an accompanying nonfiction essay about literary representations of the Holocaust. Publishers were unsure of how to market such a work, so Martel took Beatrice & Virgil through different iterations.

"Its making was so torturous," he says. "You know: play, essay, revamp the novel, forget the essay. At one point I said, 'OK, just let go.'"

Martel eventually found inspiration in the form of a taxidermist.

"I initially wrote out this play, and it just didn't work. And then I happened to read in the New York Times this article on a taxidermy firm that burnt down in Paris, called Deyrolle. And so I just saw that word 'taxidermy,' and I suddenly realized, 'That works for me.'"

As he explains, "Writers and historians in a sense do the same thing that taxidermists do: they take the past, they take something that's dead, and they try to give it life again."

The discovery led him to rewrite the novel to include a mysterious taxidermist character, also named Henry. This addition proved to be Martel's masterstroke. A frustrated scribe in his own right, the gruff, aging animal-stuffer seeks out Henry the author's assistance in the writing of a play, which centres on two animals, Beatrice and Virgil. (Martel's novel includes long excerpts of this fictional play.)

As Henry and Henry sift through the play's fragments, Beatrice and Virgil's absurdist musings about such banal subjects as bananas and pears gradually give way to more ominous topics blue and grey stripes, a red cloth of suffering, and something the donkey and monkey refer to as "The Horrors." In the process, Martel is able to broach a loaded historical subject in a way that's inventive and wholly affecting.

Martel speaks about the importance of keeping the dialogue about the Holocaust alive in ways that "people can actually absorb," and the pros and cons of relying on history books to tell us about it.

"We need those reports," Martel says. "We need to know what happened before we even try to understand it. But I think at one point, we have to go beyond it, we have to synthesize it into our thinking, into our imagination, and that requires a bit less focus on the facts, and a bit more focus on their meaning, their resonance, their echoes."

Throughout the course of our interview, Martel's encyclopedic knowledge of his subject shines through whether he's rattling off statistics about the Second World War, recounting a curious joke once told in a concentration camp or pausing to praise fellow authors who've dared to use the Holocaust as fodder for imaginative fiction.

Martel's remarks always circle back to the importance of stories, and he's never more animated than when describing how the absence of compelling narratives has caused the Korean War to vanish from public consciousness, while "nonsense" like the Rambo movies has actually helped to keep the Vietnam War fresh in our minds.

"History must become story. And that's what I think we have to start doing with the Holocaust. It's not to travesty its spirit, but it's to say, The facts aren't so important, we must play with them, break it down so that we can live with it. Turn it into a suitcase. You know how you carry the essential when you travel with a suitcase? Art can do that. Art can be the suitcase that simplifies, clarifies. Then, if you want to go home and see the whole thing, then you can go read your big history books, and go to Auschwitz, go to Yad Vashem."

Beatrice & Virgil is in stores now.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBC News.