The boy and the tiger

Something about this almost-fairy-tale novel made me want to know if it was based on actual events. It opens with a short preface that describes how the author had been travelling through India in search of material for a book when he came across an elderly man in the town of Pondicherry, south of Madras, who told him that he knew "a story that will make you believe in God". The old man tells the story, which does indeed amaze the author, and then reveals that its protagonist is alive and well and living in Canada. The author seeks him out. His name is Pi Patel and Life of Pi is his story.

This might have been precisely how Canadian novelist Yann Martel came to write his book.

Equally, the preface to Life of Pi may be no more than a narrative conceit. Pi's story contains some entirely imaginary and implausible elements. But it also has the unmistakable feeling of a story that someone has told with the quiet assurance of fact.

I lost my patience. I broke with all the etiquette of fiction, got hold of Martel's e-mail address and put the question to the author himself. Is Pi real?

I got a brief e-mail back, addressed to "Alex, the agnostic". It read: "What do you think? Why do you think that? Why does it matter to you? Which do you prefer?"

I had been justly cornered by Martel. After all, what's a good story if not one that leaves you genuinely uncertain whether it really happened or not? As a child, Pi is a practising Hindu, Muslim and Christian, believing in all three stories, although all three can't be equally true.

For a novel that sets out to make you believe in God, Life of Pi is not very difficult to sketch.

Pi is the son of a zookeeper in the former French territory of Pondicherry. In 1977, to escape Indira Gandhi's Emergency Rule, Pi's family emigrates to Canada, taking the zoo animals with them.

On 2 July, their container ship sinks. The only two survivors are Pi and a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. Adrift on the Pacific in a lifeboat, boy and beast last 227 days - the longest anyone has ever survived as a castaway at sea. Washed ashore in Canada, Pi marries and has children. As the author says, "this story has a happy ending".

All of this you can learn from the initial section of the novel. "The end of the book should come first," Martel explains, leaving his novel to build towards not the final redemption of Pi and Richard Parker, but the mystery and the nightmare of how they get on together at sea. Martel finds the most compulsive route to the middle of his delightful tale and to his central question. Could this story be true? Could a boy and a tiger, lost at sea, live

together without supplies for two-thirds of a year?

This curious man-animal relationship never drifts into anthropomorphic sentimentality, or an episode from the Jungle Book. Pi knows that he is always, potentially, Richard Parker's lunch. But nor can he survive without the companionship of his feral seamate. He deals with Richard Parker as a lion tamer would, learning how to assert territory and dominance. He tells his story as a young zoologist.

And yet, there are touches of the supernatural, most notably when the castaways drift into an island consisting of deep, thick algae that desalinates ocean water and consumes fish, or even living flesh. Most of the things that happen to Pi are possible; and the few that are not could be explained as a desperate child's hallucinations.

Life of Pi will not actually make you believe in God. But it could make you believe in the likelihood of a story that, most likely, isn't true. Which is almost as good.