Yann Martel is a genius, plain and simple. The proof is published for all to read: Life of Pi, Beatrice and Virgil, and now The High Mountains of Portugal. The first won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2002 and was adapted into an Oscar Award-winning film in 2012. The second was praised by this reviewer as “part play, part autobiography, part holocaust narrative, part suspense story, part allegory” which made for “a powerful and rewarding read”. In his latest work Martel has masterfully combined all the elements which have become his hallmarks — powerful storytelling, contemplations about faith, allegory, mystery, magic realism, and animal-based fiction — into one spellbinding novel.

The first part of the novel titled ‘Homeless’ is set in 1904 in Lisbon, Portugal, where Tomàs is the assistant curator at a museum of ancient art. Tomàs takes 10 days’ leave from work in order to search for a crucifix mentioned in the personal diary of Father Ulisses, a 17th century Portuguese missionary who worked among the slaves in colonised Angola. Tomàs believes that the religious relic which features an ape will be found in a church located in one of the villages in the High Mountains of Portugal. The journey is undertaken on his rich uncle’s motor car, a new mode of transportation that arouses both amazement and suspicion on rural roads. Recently bereaved Tomàs is furious with God and his quest is a search for revenge, not an act of devotion.

The second part titled ‘Homeward’ takes place in 1938 in Braganca, Portugal, in the office of pathologist Dr Eusebio Lozora. It is late at night on New Year’s Eve yet the doctor is hard at work. Maria, his beloved wife of 38 years, drops in with a bottle of wine and details of her latest discovery: the similarities between the mysteries of Agatha Christie and the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the New Testament. She says that the findings are her gift to him since he is both a faithful Christian and an Agatha Christie fan. After Maria leaves, there is another knock on the door. It’s a woman who says that she has come from Tuizelo, a village located in the High Mountains and wants to find out how her “deceased husband lived”. Before morning arrives Eusebio has sewn both a monkey and a little bear cub into a dead man’s body.

Yann Martel’s latest novel is no less brilliant than the preceding ones

The last part of the novel is called “Home”. It is 1988 and Peter Tovy is a senior senator in Ottawa. He has recently lost his beloved wife Clara and does not know how to deal with his grief and loneliness. A colleague helps him by arranging a work trip to Oklahoma where Peter unexpectedly visits a chimpanzee sanctuary and adopts Odo. Unsure of how a chimpanzee would adjust to life in Canada’s capital, Peter decides to move to Portugal, to the village of Tuizelo in the High Mountains from where he emigrated as a two-year-old with his parents. At first Odo elicits bewilderment and fear among the village residents, but soon they become friendly, even welcoming towards him.

Martel masterfully weaves together the many loose threads in the three stories to create one tidy whole novel. Tomàs felt angry and “homeless” when he headed out of Lisbon in search of a monkey; Dr Eusebio, the devout Catholic who listens to his wife’s views regarding faith and fiction provides the bridge “homeward”; while Peter manages to find “home” in the High Mountains of Portugal where he sets an example of peaceful co-existence between man and primate.

In terms of structure The High Mountains of Portugal is impressive. But even as they close the book after reading the last page, readers who know Martel’s previous works will wonder: was that really it? Was the monkey simply a monkey? Or was the monkey in fact a representation of faith? Or perhaps hope? Moreover, did the monkeys actually exist in any of the three stories or were they conjured up by the imagination of the lonely protagonists? In Life of Pi the orangutan turned out to be a representation of Pi’s devoted but hapless mother. In Beatrice and Virgil the ever anxious Virgil is a stuffed monkey who represents the victims of the Holocaust.

The High Mountains of Portugal is wide open to interpretation. The wealth of religious symbolism that permeates it is impossible to ignore, yet it is also in equal parts an ode to animals and a portrayal of human tenderness and grief. But despite the multiple layers of narrative and characters, at the novel’s core lies a single ‘great truth’, one that was discovered centuries ago by Father Ulisses, a homesick missionary disillusioned by the colonial enterprise: “we are risen apes, not fallen angels.”

The reviewer is a former staffer of Dawn. Her second book, The Muslimah Who Fell To Earth and other stories will be published in October by Mawenzi House, Toronto.

The High Mountains of Portugal
(NOVEL)
By Yann Martel
Knopf, Canada
ISBN 978-081299170
332pp.