The Big Read: The latest novel from Yann Martel

Yann Martel, the Canadian author of the 2001 bestseller Life of Pi, once explained that he uses animal characters in his novels because “they help suspend my reader’s disbelief.” Pi’s shipmates, of course, were furry and four-legged, and a taxidermied donkey and monkey appeared in 2010’s Beatrice and Virgil, in which a writer named Henry (serving as a stand-in for the author) championed unusual characters like “rhinoceros dentists.” Why? Because “we have certain ideas about dentists. We don’t have many ideas about rhinoceros dentists.”

True to form, there are a few chimpanzees and a bear in Martel’s latest book, The High Mountains of Portugal, as well as a brief appearance by an extinct Iberian rhinoceros (no mention, though, of a dental practice). But the animals central to Martel’s concern this time around are human men gone wild with grief.

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Divided into three sections (“Homeless,” “Homeward” and “Home”), the story is told in a trio of intersecting narratives. The first, set in 1904 Lisbon, finds upper-class and eccentric Tomás reeling from the deaths — all in the same week — of his mistress, their young son and his father. In need of escape, he sets out in a borrowed Renault, one of the first cars to travel the bumpy back roads of Portugal, searching for a potentially valuable crucifix carved by a 17th-century priest. The next tale picks up 35 years later, when another man in mourning, a pathologist whose wife may have been murdered, has a deeply strange encounter with a woman who appears in his office with her dead husband stuffed in a suitcase and demands an impromptu autopsy. Lastly, in the early 1980s, a recently widowed Canadian senator adopts a chimpanzee on a half-mad whim while visiting an animal sanctuary, then abandons his job and relocates to his ancestral village in rural Portugal, with the creature in tow.

Characteristically weird and fantastical, the novel demands the reader’s trust that these disparate threads will knit together into a coherent whole. A bit of patience is required. Sometimes Martel overindulges in whimsy — Tomás walks everywhere backwards, for instance, an unnecessary quirk — and the surreal middle story, while effective, doesn’t entirely fit the tone of the other more straightforward narratives. But some confusion is to be expected, since Martel aims to articulate what is often impossible to explain: the existence of God and nature, the senselessness of dislocation and death.

Ultimately, Martel pulls his three stories together through neatly placed clues, much like the Agatha Christie mysteries so adored by the pathologist and his late wife, for a thoughtful meditation on the struggle to stay human when all that we love and all that is familiar is taken from us. In The High Mountains of Portugal, as in Life of Pi, he reveals the thin shell of civilization that covers the beast beneath, and shows how swiftly trauma and pain can make us revert to our animal selves.

The High Mountains of Portugal, Yann Martel, $32.

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