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Q&Q reviews Yann Martel’s Beatrice & Virgil

Quill & Quire contributing editor James Grainger weighs in with a review of what is undoubtedly this season’s powerhouse Canadian novel, Yann Martel’s Beatrice & Virgil. The story of a writer, Henry, who meets a taxidermist, also named Henry, involves an allegorical play about the Holocaust. Grainger finds the novel thematically ambitious, although its execution fails to live up to of the author’s intention.

Martel obviously wants readers to equate, at least to some degree, Henry the novelist with himself – like Martel, Henry is the son of Canadian diplomats, is married, and has a baby son – so it is hardly a stretch to judge the success of the novel by Henry’s ambitions to portray the Holocaust in a “nonliteral and compact way,” free of the burden of historical realism and not “framed by the same dates, set in the same places.”

Does Beatrice & Virgil accomplish those goals?

Not really. That doesn’t make it a bad book, though. Martel’s prose is never boring, and his authorial voice is as playful, witty, and downright smart as ever. Describing his predilection for including non-human characters in his work, Martel has Henry say: “We are cynical about our own species, but less so about animals, especially wild ones. We might not shelter them from habitat destruction, but we tend to shelter them from excessive irony.” Later, Henry the taxidermist is described as “serious and sober as a microscope.” There are few writers in Canada who can regularly pull off such sharp, musical phrasing. Martel’s description of a fox being skinned and prepped for mounting is a set-piece of surreal power, and much of the dialogue from the play fragments is both disturbingly hypnotic and touching.

The entire review is online on the Quill website.