The High Mountains of Portugal - Yann Martel

In 1904, a young widower travels to the High Mountains of Portugal in search of a bizarre crucifix carved by a Seventeenth Century missionary; in 1938, a pathologist carries out a highly irregular post-mortem, on behalf of a peasant woman who has arrived at his office carrying her husband’s body in a suitcase; and in 1981, a Canadian politician retires from office and travels across the Atlantic to find a new home, which he shares with a chimpanzee he has purchased from a sanctuary. Yann Martel’s first novel in six years features three interconnected narratives, all of which feature the writer’s allegorical, Whimsical Realist style.

There are times when it feels like Martel is laying on the whimsy a bit thick: his description of characters who insist on walking backwards to demonstrate grief, for example, is indulgent, and while he touches on Portugal’s colonial history, you get the sense that he wants to keep things lighter than he did in Beatrice and Virgil. There is some excellent writing, however; one character’s eyes, we are told, ‘for the most part relieved of the burden of directing him, relax in his skull like two passengers sitting on deck chairs at the rear of a ship'. Another character confidently declares that 'an automobile is as harmless as a cigarette. Mark my words... the twentieth century will be remembered as the century of the puff of smoke'. A monologue comparing the New Testament to an Agatha Christie murder mystery also works extremely well.

The style progresses from the comedy of a character attempting to travel across Portugal’s dirt track roads in an unfamiliar car, astonishing and alarming the villagers he encounters on the way, through the surrealism of a pathologist opening a body to find an alarming range of foreign objects crammed in beneath the skin, to a reflective closing segment in which a bereaved and retired man finds comfort in the company of a chimpanzee. The most effective of these narratives is the final one. This is probably the closest we come to the style of Life of Pi, featuring once again a human existing in isolation with a wild animal. Here, though, the human character, Peter Tovy, has made the decision willingly, to travel 'from the Senate of Canada, surrounded by all the amenities of the modern world... to this cave-age dwelling on the fringes of nowhere'.

Martel resists the tendency to anthropomorphise his animal character here; the chimpanzee, Odo, mimics human behaviour at times, but remains ‘essentially unknowable’, and retains an aura of potential threat. As they grow accustomed to one another, Tovy finds that he is behaving more like a chimp, rather than Odo behaving like him; he learns ‘the skill of doing nothing’ – just being. Whereas others have studied Odo intensively, Tovy acknowledges early on that his 'tools of understanding... shed little light on the ape's behaviour', and that he can benefit most from observing Odo’s 'intense silence, pensive slowness, profound simplicity'. There is ‘a reward in… mystery, and enduring amazement.'

There is a feeling in all three stories that humans need to look backwards in order to truly understand their place in the world. As Tomas, protagonist of the first narrative, offers literal and metaphorical justifications for his habit of walking backwards: 'Walking backwards, his back to the world, his back to God, he is not grieving. He is objecting. Because when everything cherished by you in life has been taken away, what else is there to do but object... should one trip, what safer way to do so than backwards, the cushioned buttocks blunting one’s fall?” It is this need to understand life backwards which leads a widow to ask a pathologist to tell her how her husband lived. Martel is guilty of sentimentalizing rural people; the High Mountains of Portugal symbolise something pure and untouched, where people’s lives are more harmonious than city people can imagine.

The chimpanzee is likewise a symbol of mankind’s inner, uncorrupted nature for Mantel. Tomas is sent on his quest to the High Mountains after he discovers the diary of Father Ulisses, a missionary in the slave colony of Sao Tomo: 'Long before Darwin, a priest lucid in his madness encountered four chimpanzees on a forlorn island in Africa  and hit upon a great truth: We are risen apes, not fallen angels'. In the second story, a chimpanzee represents a father’s deeply buried love for his son; and in the third, Odo represents the core of humanity, stripped of the complexities of politics and civilisation.

The High Mountains of Portugal sees Mantel back on fairly safe literary ground; his grasp of style is used to amuse rather than astonish, and while his stories are well-plotted, there is little substance behind them. The final strand of the narrative, concerning Peter and Odo, is the strongest; the previous strands are entertaining, but not essential. Too often, we the author hints that his narrators are unreliable, rather than committing fully to the magical elements of his stories. There’s a tightness to the plotting, and a turn of phrase, that you won’t see often in mainstream fiction, but Martel never quite reaches the heights of Life of Pi.