Will Yann Martel's new book match Life of Pi success?
Yann Martel came to the world's attention for his quirky Life of Pi, a tale of a boy adrift in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger that became a bestseller, winning acclaim from the likes of President Barack Obama.
After almost a decade comes Beatrice and Virgil, whose protagonist, Henry, has won riches and renown for a spiritually inclined novel featuring wild animals.
He is a lot like his author, who also lives in Canada, has a young son named Theo and has struggled to complete a Holocaust-themed book.
A sprawling and convoluted work despite its slender spine, Beatrice begins with the rejection of Henry's high-concept "flip book" by his publishers.
Combining a novel and, when turned upside down and over, an essay, Henry's book explores his worry that while there are plenty of war thrillers, war comedies, and war science fictions, the Holocaust is invariably written about in one style: historical realism.
"Was there not a danger to representing the Holocaust in a way always beholden to factuality?" Henry asks. The way he sees it, unless the imagination is applied to historical events, they cannot truly be understood.
His publishers are, however, more concerned about where to put the bar code on a book with two front covers.
Smarting from rejection, Henry leaves Canada for an unspecified foreign city. One day, he receives a fat envelope containing a macabre story by Flaubert, plus pages from a play starring an anthropomorphic donkey named Beatrice and her howler monkey companion, Virgil.
There is also an enigmatic plea for help. Though the sender's signature is illegible – Henry can just about decipher the first name, "Henry" – the return address is local. Setting off across the city, he finds himself standing outside a taxidermy store.
So begins a series of meetings between Henry the writer and Henry the taxidermist, a ghoulish control freak in his 80s who's looking for help finishing a play he has been wrestling with for most of his life.
Sections of this play are reproduced at length. Like Henry's doomed flip book, it has little plot and less action. Suspended in Beckettian stasis, Beatrice and Virgil – named after Dante's guides through purgatory to paradise – tramp a country named Shirt, fleeing savage persecution they've dubbed "the Horrors".
Along the way, they obsess over a single, heartbreaking problem. As Virgil puts it, "Oh, Beatrice, how are we going to talk about what happened to us one day when it's over?"
Henry realises the taxidermist's play is an attempt to write about the Holocaust allegorically. Though his flip book made the case for just such an approach, dark inklings about the taxidermist's shadowy past force a startling denouement in an otherwise torpid plot.
Martel has spoken about just how hard Beatrice and Virgil was to write. It has now been bought for large sums by publishers worldwide, and yet a feeling of failure persists.
- Out now from Dh95