Yann Martel: The Facts Behind The Helsinki Roccamatios

Reviewed by GRAHAM REID

Canadian author Yann Martel won the Man Booker prize two years ago for his wryly amusing, fable-like and thoroughly readable Life of Pi, so inevitably there would be interest in his earlier works. This slight, but provocative and alarmingly precocious, collection of four stories published a decade ago announced the arrival of a serious, and seriously smart, writer coming through.

The title story, a digressive and emotionally penetrating account of a friend dying of Aids illnesses (and much more), and Manners of the Dying were adapted for stage and screen, but the other two grip more for their refinement and multiple levels of meaning.

Martel has slightly revised these stories for this re-presentation but it is the philosophical ideas which drive them as much as the economy of style and assurance of tone.

The Vita Aeterna Mirror Company starts as a typographically realised dialogue between the bored narrator and his grandmother, the discovery of her mirror-making machine and has a twist worthy of Maupassant. Manners of the Dying are multiple versions of the final hours of a condemned man as told by the warden of the prison in letters to the man's mother. Rashomon-like, they are each plausible and despite the varying versions each is equally chilling and tragic.

Best however is the improbably titled The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton. An utterly plausible story about a chance encounter with a broken Viet-vet musician and a concert in an abandoned theatre in Washington DC, it becomes a multi-layered story about loneliness and a grasp for that which is beyond reach, with digressions into the magic of music, an aside about a piece of extraordinary punctuation by Joseph Conrad, and it becomes a meditation on lost opportunity.

Martel's deft and gentle prose was persuasive in Life of Pi, and these early works are proof that a keen imagination, astute observational eye and a refined style are hallmarks of a writer whose consistent theme is the necessity of memory. The self-effacing introduction about his early and desperate attempts at writing confirm the humour he brought to Pi is also central to his work.

His next novel is awaited with considerable enthusiasm. Until then here are four economic stories with long resonances.

* Canongate, $29.95