Pack your bags: Fifteen years after “The Life of Pi,” Yann Martel is taking us on another long journey. Fans of his Man Booker Prize-winning novel will recognize familiar themes from that seafaring phenomenon, but the itinerary in this imaginative new book is entirely fresh.
In fact, “The High Mountains of Portugal” is actually a set of three delicately connected novellas that take place decades apart. With Martel’s signature mixture of humor and pathos, these three stories explore the rugged terrain of grief. But they also contain the author’s reflections on the connection between storytelling and faith.
The first part, “Homeless,” is the longest and the most itinerant. It opens in Lisbon in 1904, a place and time cast in old-world elegance. A young man named Tomas has recently lost his son, his lover and his father, a trifecta of death that’s left him so turned around by sorrow that he walks backward. “Some people never laugh again. Others take to drink,” Martel writes. “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?”
The gaping maw of Tomas’ desolation would seem to swallow the story whole, but Martel constantly pushes back with light, arch humor: “Should one trip,” he writes, “what safer way to do so than backwards, the cushioned buttocks blunting one’s fall?” That comedy grows broader when Tomas borrows an automobile from his wealthy uncle. He has no idea how to drive, and as he jerks and careens across Portugal — usually in first gear — he’s an object of fascination and assault.
That same tonal shift takes place again in the second story, “Homeward,” but it’s a wholly different kind of tale. Instead of driving across Portugal for days, we’re trapped for a single strange night in the office of Dr. Lozora, a pathologist in Braganca, Portugal, in the late 1930s. Dr. Lozora’s beloved wife interrupts him during an autopsy to explain her curious theory about the connection between the Gospels and Agatha Christie.
That theme receives its most effective treatment in the final novella called “Home,” which involves a Canadian politician who loses his wife. Lethargic with grief and an embarrassment to his colleagues, Sen. Peter Tovy agrees to take a junket to a chimp refuge in Oklahoma, just to get him out of Parliament for a few days. But there, in a laboratory filled with screaming apes, he connects with a most-surprising new friend.
Martel’s writing has never been more charming, a rich mixture of sweetness that’s not cloying and tragedy that’s not melodramatic.