ON BOOKER PRIZE night last October, Yann Martel told the BBC that he wanted to
invest his £50,000 prize money ethically. In a Soho café six months later I
inquire after the £50,000, as you might ask about the health of a mutual
friend. Martel, you see, says he doesn’t care about money. This wouldn’t be
remarkable in someone who has lived through his thirties without any
practice at spending the stuff, except that now there is a great foaming
avalanche of it pounding in his direction and a mild panic appears to have
set in.
“One of the reasons I am the way I am about material goods is from boarding
school,” Martel says. “The first year my roommate was, I would argue,
borderline sociopathic. He was one of those nasty boys who was intelligent
too —and that’s the worst combination. One of the things he did was
basically destroy everything I had. He would take my books, rip out all the
pages and substitute the covers. It sounds funny now, but when you’re a kid
. . .
“I had a dodo bird that my grandmother bought when she went to Mauritius. He
broke off the legs and glued it to my desk. I had a UN flag, and he tore it
up. Over the year I realised I could react in two ways. Either guard my
stuff or let go of it. I started thinking: what is the worth of these books?
Why, if this book is torn, do I hurt? “They are material supports for
something that’s essentially non-material. The importance of a book is not
really the book; I’m not a bibliophile. It’s the story in it — I mean, these
are mass-produced books. So I started detaching myself from material goods.
I want as few as possible and what I have is of passing value.”
The nasty little git never got any comeuppance because, nervous of not having
witnessed the vandalism, Martel didn’t tell anyone.
Even now he won’t accuse him — “he’s some nameless mediocrity probably living
in the midwest of the United States” — but evidently something of that time
lives on.
“The (Booker) cheque was for £55,000 — an extra £5,000 for being a finalist —
and it’s in a bank in Canada. I’ve been too busy to do anything with it. But
you know what? I only found out last night: Life of Pi is the most
popular Booker prizewinner ever,” he says. “It’s great! There’s a lot of
money coming from the UK, Canada and the US.
English-speaking Canada has 22 million people and it’s sold 200,000 copies
there. It’s still in the bestseller list in the US, it’s number one in
Germany: I’m making piles of money. But . . .”
And if there wasn’t a “but” I guess I wouldn’t be talking to him about it .
“How much money does a person need? I’m 39, I’m going to be 40 this summer.
Let’s say I live another 40 years. How much money do I need for 40 years?”He
is, he reckons, close to being a millionaire as a result of Life of Pi,
but hasn’t yet felt many of the practical benefits, which potentially would
be quite considerable, because the last time he came to London he walked
everywhere, having no money for transport. “I’m catching taxis much more
this time and recently, in Dublin, I bought three CDs — a Latin American
one, an African one and something else. But I haven’t got a stereo to play
them on.”
I have caught him at a point between two extremes of wealth. He survived on
around 6,000 Canadian dollars (£3,000) in Montreal for several years.
Although he had some savings and his parents helped him out, that is well
below the poverty line. “How did I get by? Easily, by hardly buying
anything. I want next to nothing that can be bought. I’m happy just being.
We’re on this earth for only a few minutes and you can’t take anything with
you, so why bother with dry goods?” I’d been hoping for more detail, but to
tell me that he had to live on baked beans would, I suppose, imply that he
cared.
It is often observed that only people who have money say it’s unimportant.
Martel admits that his background was comfortable, that his parents —
retired diplomats who introduced him to travelling as a way of life —
continued to help him financially as an adult and that you “have to have a
huge television before you can decide to switch it off”. But unlike Peter
Ackroyd, Jeanette Winterson or Charles Dickens, whose working-class
backgrounds amply equipped them to appreciate their money when it arrived,
wealth seems like a bit of an affliction for Martel. Not embarassing, but
puzzling and certainly problematic.
He is a non-smoking vegetarian teetotaller who does yoga; it comes as a mild
relief to discover that he likes chocolate, to the point where, just before
winning the prize, he invested a small amount in a free trade chocolate
company in North America.
So he clearly is interested in money. It’s just his relationship with his own
that he seems to find problematic. “Money is very convenient, but ultimately
the effect of the whole monetary system is a delinking of cause and effect.”
He talks about buying shares in Shell with all its attendant Nigeria/human
rights issues and draws a parallel with eating meat. “The system means that
you don’t have to see the costs involved.”
This realpolitik reveals that, in most of the ways that count, Martel is
pretty streetwise. He’s thinking about buying a car because he’d like to
drive across Canada for his 40th birthday. But although as a child he
alighted upon Mercedes as “my standard of a luxury car” he balks at the
suggestion that he could indulge a childhood fantasy and get one. “Parts are
very expensive and no one in Canada drives a Mercedes. Maybe, if I could get
a used one in a country where it isn’t too expensive to maintain . . . then
I’d probably get one.” Similarly, he says that he has a few months of book
tour-related globetrotting ahead of him, but the thought has occurred that
perhaps he should buy a house when he goes back to Montreal in October. “But
I’m afraid that if I buy a place I’ll start obsessing about cracks in the
walls and the floors not being straight and . . . it’s just a house. It’s
such a hassle, I’d have to take care of the place.”
So there appears to be a chink for manoeuvre on the issue of consumerism, and
if there wasn’t, to be frank, it would be the only kind of conservatism he’s
got. After a couple of fun hours (he has an enjoyably light conversational
touch) the advertised sobriety of his lifestyle seems as incongruous as his
tweedy jacket — “I bought it to meet the media. You’ll be seeing a lot of
this, it’s the only one I’ve got.”
I didn’t have to ask whether having dependants would make any difference.
Three times he remarked that having children changed everything. He says
he’s broody, although I hope he realises that, having mentioned this, he
will never again be able to attend a publishing party in safety. “I’m
between partners. But things are happening . . . I’ll have a partner soon.”
This time his optimism is probably justified — he says there’s someone
special. “But I do want children. If I didn’t have them I think my life
would be a failure. Books are great, but children are like a Russian novel
that never ends. And you need money for them . . . though probably not as
much as you might think. I mean, you never hear anyone say that they had a
happy childhood because their father was rich, do you? Always because
someone loved them.”
Somehow this develops into stream-of-consciousness musing about a woman in
Quebec who had 21 children. I fret momentarily for his intended, but then it
passes.
On prize night he said that winning the Booker made him feel like a Normandy
beach during the D-Day landings. If life is, in fact, a beach, his Normandy
days are behind him. He just hasn’t changed into his sandals yet.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Canongate £12.99
