Real Life is rubbish

I don’t know about you, but I loved Yann Martell’s Life of Pi. I thought it was one of the most startlingly original novels I’ve ever read in my life. And that includes Mervyn Peake’s monumental Gormenghast trilogy. So we’re up against stiff competition.

But not long after I read it, a peculiar thing started to happen. People began to say to me: a shipwrecked boy sharing his lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, hyena and orang-utan in the Pacific Ocean? You gotta be kidding they cried! They said it couldn’t happen. It wasn’t real. The boy would be eaten, the tiger would drown, the boat would capsize, blah blah yawn yawn…their voices began to merge into one long continuous drone. I began to feel depressed and needed a Jack Daniels and coke. Quickly.

Yes, these people had an effect on me. When they said Life of Pi wasn’t true what they meant was; life is not like that. Apart from the obvious question of how on earth would they know (who do you know who’s recently been shipwrecked in a lifeboat with a tiger?) they miss the point of storytelling; it doesn’t have to be true to be believable!

Personally I’ve never come across fairies in my local woods but I groove over Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream every time I see it. Who is Keyser Soze in the film The Usual Suspects? Arch-criminal? Bogeyman? Anti-Christ? I couldn’t give a fig, it was a damn good crime thriller. Salman Rushdie is up against this problem all the time. Here’s the opening chapter of The Satanic Verses:

‘To be born again’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won’t cry? How to with the darling’s love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again…’ Just before dawn one winter’s morning, New Year’s Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky’

Men don’t fall 20,000 ft out of the sky and live do they? No they don’t, if you don’t believe it. But when the words are this good (as they often are in Rushdie’s case) o, yes, I believe it alright. Good storytelling requires a willingness to believe that is almost akin to religious fervour, the only difference being of course that getting ‘really into a book’ rarely leads to stuff like The Crusades, home-grown suicide bombers and George ‘Dubya’ Bush.

I realize it personal taste, but people who don’t get Life of Pi and baulk at the ‘unrealness’ of its hero’s adventures remind me of the grim-faced schoolmaster Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times:

‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’

It was Daniel Pennac in his wonderful book, The Rights of the Reader, a passionate defence of reading for pleasure, who said you have the right to mistake a book for real life. And he’s spot on. I’d rather go to an unreal place I believed in than one that was real but I didn’t believe in.

Because let’s face it, real life often is rubbish.