Beatrice and Virgil

The Frame

Henry is a novelist who has had enormous success with a book somewhat like Life of Pi — a fable with a big philosophical question at its heart — and has spent years since trying to write something about the Holocaust. His conception is formally unusual: a flip book combining a novel and an essay, one side the fiction, the other the argument. No publisher will take it. The rejections are not hostile but final, and Henry eventually abandons the project and moves with his wife to an unnamed city, where he takes odd jobs and tries to recover some relationship with writing.

Into this creative stasis comes a letter from a taxidermist, also named Henry, who has read his novels and enclosed the first pages of an unfinished play. The play features two characters: a donkey named Beatrice and a howler monkey named Virgil. The taxidermist wants the novelist’s help completing it. Their meetings are strange — the taxidermist is opaque, his shop is full of elaborately preserved animals, and his purposes are never made explicit — but Henry finds himself drawn into the play’s world, reading its pages and responding to what it seems to be reaching toward. The frame story is spare to the point of thinness, and this is either its virtue or its flaw depending on what you expect fiction to provide. Martel is withholding explanation deliberately, but the withholding can feel less like control than evasion.

The Play

The embedded play is where the novel does its most interesting work. Beatrice the donkey and Virgil the monkey exist in a landscape that is nowhere and everywhere — unnamed, without historical markers, clearly allegorical in intention. They describe objects, textures, tastes, and experiences from a world they have lost or are losing, in a series of exchanges that are precise and affecting and deliberately oblique. The Dante reference — Beatrice and Virgil as guides through an inferno — is not pursued literally but atmospherically, and Martel uses the animal voices to approach the Holocaust without naming it.

The choice of animals is not arbitrary. Animals in fiction carry associations of innocence that human characters cannot — they cannot be complicit, cannot be perpetrators, cannot be ideologues. Placing Beatrice and Virgil in a landscape of systematic destruction allows Martel to ask what is being done to them without triggering the defences that Holocaust representation in conventional realist fiction can activate. The play’s strength is also its limit: the animal voices achieve genuine pathos, but the allegory requires us to translate their situation back into human terms, and that translation is never quite automatic. The gap between the animals and the historical reality they are meant to illuminate remains, at times, too wide.

The Controversy

The novel was received with unusual hostility by critics who expected a worthy successor to Life of Pi and found instead something hermetic and, in its final pages, genuinely shocking. The taxidermist’s revelation in the novel’s closing pages — the games he has compiled for the end of the world, and the violence of the ending itself — struck many readers as a tonal catastrophe, a lurch into darkness that the preceding allegory had not prepared them for and that seemed to exploit the Holocaust’s horror rather than genuinely engage with it.

This response is understandable but not entirely fair. Martel is, throughout the novel, asking whether the aesthetic consolation that literary fiction provides is a form of complicity with the events it represents — whether the beauty of the prose and the satisfactions of the form are themselves a kind of lie when the subject is systematic murder. The disturbing ending is one answer to this question: a refusal of the consolation that the allegorical frame had been building. Whether this refusal works as art or simply as provocation is the question the novel leaves genuinely open, and that openness — maddening to many readers — may be the most honest thing about it.

Our rating: 3.6/5 — A morally serious and formally unusual attempt to think through the ethics of representing the Holocaust, which does not entirely succeed but asks its questions with more rigour than the negative reception suggests.