Book Review: The High Mountains of Portugal
Yann Martel hardly need an introduction. He has written a total of 7 books and his fourth novel Life of Pi sold over 10 million copies internationally and won amongst others, The Man Booker Prize 2002, CBC’s English and French Canada Reads 2003. Martel is of course a Canadian writer, who was born in Spain to French-speaking Canadian parents and whose widespread travels are reflected in the wonderful imagery of his books. He now lives with his wife and children in Saskatoon.
His latest novel, The High Mountains of Portugal, is divided into three seemingly unrelated books, entitled Homeless, Homeward and Home. It begins in 19th century Lisbon, a young man named Tomas loses his child, the love of his life, and his father all in the same week. In his desperation, he departs for the strange, rural High Mountains of Portugal in the hopes of recovering an artefact that he reads about in an old diary. And he finds the artefact, a crucifix in which Christ is stylized as ape-like, but not before he accidentally kills a young boy who has crawled into the engine of his vehicle.
Homeward takes place in Braganca in 1938, when middle-aged pathologist Eusibio Lozora , after being visited by his recently deceased wife, is visited by an old woman who has brought her husband’s body in her suitcase and requests that he tells her “how her husband lived” after her son died mysteriously as a little boy decades before. After a strange autopsy in which they find a chimp cuddling a cub in his chest cavity the woman climbs into her husband’s chest and is sewn in while chanting “This is home”.
In Home, a retired Canadian senator named Peter searches for meaning after his wife dies and on a whim, buys a Chimp named Odo and departs for his parent’s native Portugal. Peter’s and Odo’s adventure is one that collapses the three stories into one cohesive narrative that mingles the real and the fantastic.
There are so many elements to this story, and Martel layers the details expertly in his exploration of faith, family, and human suffering. In this tale that spans three countries and three centuries, what is most striking is not what changes as the book progresses but how much stays the same. What is inherent across generations and cultures about the way that we connect with loved ones, the way we mourn them? And is this connection something innately or exclusively human? The book asks as many questions as it purports to answer.
Beyond the literary merits of this novel, it was a story that I genuinely enjoyed reading. Drenched with emotion and peppered with humour, it was exactly the story that you can expect from the author of Life of Pi, able at once to appeal to your imagination and whimsy whilst making you ponder the nature of life and loss.
