Everyone but everyone told me how good this was, and it is quite good, but it's really not all that. I don't know what it is - it's as if, in some essential way, the novel is clumsy or not quite perfectly realised in a way which has nothing to do with the idiosyncratic voice of Pi Patel (or at least isn't reducible to the deliberate diffractions of that voice)...some part of me just resists it, I don't know why. That said, the ending is (as several people had promised) really something, and there are some genuinely amusing passages along the way (the battle between the tiger and the shark, the interactions between Pi and the Japanese investigators at the end), and it wasn't anywhere near as twee as the synopses I'd heard had led me to fear (not twee at all, in fact).
...okay, maybe here's what it is: Life of Pi does what it does very well - but I'm not entirely keen on what it does (tautological enough?). Part of this probably comes from the magic realist elements...
