In it are five survivors: Pi, a hyena, a zebra, an orang utan and a 450 pound Royal Bengal tiger. A solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the surface of the wild blue Pacific. When the parents decide to emigrate to Canada, the family boards a cargo ship with many of the animals that are going to new zoological homes in North America, and bravely sets sail for the New World. He devours books on Hinduism, Christianity and Islam, and to the surprise of his secular parents, becomes devoted to all three religions. Piscine Molitor Patel, nicknamed Pi, lives in Pondicherry, India, where his family runs a zoo. “Best-selling now, forgotten tomorrow.” He adds, “commercially, I made so much money on Life of Pi, I don’t need to make more.” (Hello, Odo!) But he says there’s “no more and no less” riding on his new book “than any other book I’ve written.The Jungle Book meets Not Wanted On the Voyage in a triumph of storytelling and originality: a novel, as one character puts it, to make you believe in God. Martel is frank about his commercial success. It’s unlikely he could: Life of Pi is, according to Martel’s publisher, the best selling Canadian book in history, and it’s the global best-seller of all Booker Prize winners.

That earlier book is, of course, the 12-million-copies-sold tiger in the room, and some journalists have said Martel has a lot riding on this new book, as if he has to outdo what he’s done before. Quill & Quire, the Canadian publishing industry magazine, has already dissed The High Mountains of Portugal in a tepid review, which contains at least one factual error (the senator never takes the chimpanzee “back to Canada”), and pouts that the book is not “as toothsome” as was The Life of Pi. “Look at this sophomoric thing he’s calling Godot. I’d get nailed by, let’s say, Quill & Quire, for example,” he says, and laughs. “I thought at one point of calling the chimpanzee Godot but I thought it was too bloody obvious. Odo is the middle letters of Godot.” As in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

“You’re the first journalist to ask me this so I will tell you. I suggest that the name of the chimpanzee, Odo, is from an old Germanic word meaning possessor of wealth, and Martel says that wasn’t his motivation. He talks passionately about religion, history, myth and tradition.

He also wanted a setting that was linked to the slave trade, and that is “on the edges of an empire,” as Palestine was on the edge of the Roman empire, a place of no consequence where history was changed. “It was the first country I sort of explored entirely on my own, and it struck me,” he says. I ask Martel, who will be at the Ottawa Writer’s Festival Feb. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

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