Beatrice and Virgil , Yann Martel's second full-length novel that comes nine years after his Man Booker Prize winning Life of Pi, is a curious beast. Highly self-reflexive, it is a novel about representation that seeks to travel to the heart of one of the 20th century's horrors, the Holocaust (never forget the capital H) and seeks to find an imaginative narrative and a metaphor for it that would preserve it in the cultural imagination (of the West?). Apart from the politics of the Holocaust, the politics of its memorialisation in contemporary Western literature and narratives, a fair approach to the novel would be to see if it succeeds on its own terms in creating an artful metaphor for evil, to see whether it manages to carry us along on yet another Western journey to the heart of darkness...
The central character, Henry, is a kind of fictionalised Martel himself: the son of widely travelled Canadian diplomats, a polyglot and a novelist with two highly acclaimed novels behind him, who has just written his third book, on the Holocaust. He is also the vehicle for much of the self-reflexivity in the novel. There is a curious imbalance, Henry feels, in our verbalisation of the Holocaust. The world is full of factual, historical, documentary and testimonial accounts of the event, but very few imaginative takes. Henry feels the need to rescue the event from the clutches of historians and to inscribe it in popular memory through fiction: “In addition to the knowledge of history, we need the understanding of art. Stories identify, unify, give meaning to. Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense” (p.14).
Henry's novel is rejected by his publishers (“Wasn't that what every Holocaust book was about, aphasia?....For his part, Henry now joined the vast majority of those who had been shut up by the Holocaust” p.18), he stops writing altogether, moves to a different, unnamed city with his wife and is trying to put his life together again on slightly different premises when he meets an old man, a taxidermist, who is also (you guessed it) writing a play on the Holocaust, with a howler monkey (Virgil) and a donkey (Beatrice) as the two central characters, who is suffering from writer's block and seeks Henry out to help him get over it...
Thus begins Henry's, and the novel's, exploration of irrational hatred and evil through the character of the taxidermist who is also, curiously, called Henry, and its terrifying impact on ordinary lives through the characters of Beatrice and Virgil. The taxidermist has his own terrible secrets, Beatrice and Virgil are his guides through his own personal hell and the play is his shot at redemption (a redemption without remorse, feels Henry) and he does eventually find it as the novel tumbles towards its predictable ending with its terrible revelations.
Web of words
At one point in the novel, Henry, speaking through Beatrice, says, “Words are like muddy toads trying to understand spirites dancing in a field – but they are all we have. I will try.” (p.85). For an attempt at trying to understand the ogres in our subterranean depths, Beatrice and Virgil , finally, is not too bad a try. Beatrice and Virgil, in their bare, Beckettian sparseness and pathos are two memorable characters that linger on long after one has put down the novel. Not so much the taxidermist as the two Henrys face off and bear the burden of carrying the weight of the novel's self-reflexivity, as they become emblematic of a too-easy opposition between heady, impulsive creativity (novelist) and plodding, methodical, joyless science (taxidermist). The layers of sometimes tedious self-consciousness around the moral core of the novel is also what gives it a tinge of pretentiousness and leaves one in two minds about the true worth and success of the novel.
Part of the book's self-consciousness is its concern with reality and truth. Works of art succeed, Martel says, because they are concerned with truth, not reality which is a 100-million details . Beatrice and Virgil partly succeeds, for me at least, because it brings home the fact that ‘truth' can be as partisan as anything else, that truth is not a monolithic universal entity, that there can be a 100 million truths out there, and by privileging a particular truth, the novel has already taken sides and therefore forces you to take yours...
Beatrice and Virgil, Yann Martel, Hamish Hamilton, 2010. p.190, Rs. 450
