The Life of Pi
While our younger daughters had friends for sleepovers last night – yes, that's right, two sleepovers, because we're stupid – we let our eldest daughter stay up late to watch a movie with us. After flicking through seemingly endless options on the Amazon Fire TV, I ended up making a random choice – “The Life of Pi”.
If you have not read the book, or watched the movie, you might not want to read any more, because this post is going to immediately ruin the story for you.
Very clever story.Very, very clever story. I don't think I've ever seen a story present two versions of itself so successfully. Religious people will take one version as “the truth”, and athiests will take the other. The reader or viewer is left to make their own mind up.
Rather than sit on the fence, I'm going to empty my head for a change.
Piscine – the narrator of the story – invites us to choose which we would rather believe – a magical story filled with adventure, dreams, hope, and beauty, or a terrifying story filled with despair, loss, and survival at all costs.
I can't help feeling that the story is an attack on the way stories are presented and interpreted by the major religions. It is crafted well enough however that manymay not even realisetheir world view is being questioned.
Like I said – it's a very clever story, from which each person will take their own meaning.