Book review: Beatrice and Virgil

Beatrice and Virgil. Photo / Supplied

Books about authors who are struggling to write can be overly indulgent and introspective. Yann Martel's convoluted allegory is neither. It is, instead, rather weird. The story starts with a thinly disguised autobiography. Henry is a writer who's had one hugely successful novel and is struggling to follow it up. He spends years trying to write something fresh and meaningful about the Holocaust, coming up with the idea of combining fiction and non-fiction in a "flip book" - part essay, part novel.

When his publishers nix the idea he abandons writing.

There is no hiding the real-life parallels here and Martel, the Booker prize-winning author of Life of Pi, doesn't try. This first part of Beatrice and Virgil feels more like an essay, justifying why it has taken him so long to write another novel.

Then Henry moves to a new city where he takes music lessons, works in a chocolateria, walks his dog and becomes a father. One day he receives a curious letter. Part of it is a photocopy of a short story by Gustave Flaubert about a man who hunts and massacres vast numbers of animals, and part of it is the fragment of a Waiting for Godot-style play, in which two characters, Virgil and Beatrice, stand beneath a tree and talk about a pear.

Henry seeks out the sender of this material _ a mysterious old taxidermist who works in a store filled with stuffed animals, among them Virgil, a howler monkey, and Beatrice, a donkey. The taxidermist needs help with a play he is writing about these two animal characters and the scenes from this play, turn out to be about the horrors of the Holocaust.

The further into this book you get, the more dark and disturbing it becomes. It's as though Martel is beguiling the reader with a fable then surprises them with brutality and reality.

If it was a masterpiece he was trying to write then Martel hasn't managed it. This is more of an oddity, touched with gothic and embedded with literary references . But if Martel wanted to trick his readers into taking a fresh look at the Holocaust, to remind them of its horror and how close it remains to us then he has succeeded.

Beatrice and Virgil may not win him another Man Booker Prize, but it is a startlingly original work, and fans of Life of Pi are certain to devour it.

* Beatrice and Virgil, by Yann Martel, Text, $39