Leap Of Faith

For Booker Prize-winning writer Yann Martel, art, much like religion, is a way of imposing order on the randomness of life.

- Anjuly Mathai

In Canadian writer Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi, about a boy stuck in a lifeboat with a tiger for 227 days, he chose the number 227 for a reason. Because it is a prime number. "In my thinking, since Pi tells two stories, I did not want those stories to be divisible," says Martel. "You either believe the story with animals. Or you believe it without animals."

He is referring to the ending of the book. When Pi reaches the shore safely and narrates to a few officials his days at sea with the tiger, his story is met with disbelief. Surely what he says is too fantastic to be real. So Pi imbues it with the "dry, yeastless factuality they are looking for".

"You want a story that won’t surprise you," Pi tells them. "That will confirm what you already know. That won’t make you see higher or further or differently."

The tiger in the story, named Richard Parker, is an allegory for the divine. He is not what is keeping Pi from living. Rather, he is what keeps him alive. "If he died," says Pi, "I would be left alone with despair, a foe even more formidable than a tiger. If I still had the will to live, it was thanks to Richard Parker."