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High Mountains sprang out of ideas that had been rolling around in Martel’s head for 30 years, since he graduated from Trent University in philosophy and started to write a book set in Portugal, which he mentions in the author’s note to Life of Pi. At the time, he says, he was “too immature … the novel was way beyond me.” He revisited the material and reshaped it radically. No longer is there a talking dog — a conceit too “Yann Martel,” it seems, even for Yann Martel — and filtered it through the experience he had in India in his 30s that led to Life of Pi.

Martel is adamant he’s not “one of those hippie-dippie Westerners who goes baa-baa ‘Indian,’” but nonetheless, he says, he realized, “the closer I am to [being] a computer doesn’t make me any better. No one on their death bed will say, ‘I’ve led a good life. I’ve been reasonable.’ I’d rather believe in Santa Claus when I was a kid, in some guru when I was in my 20s, in some political leaders when I was in my 40s, and then as I’m getting to my 80s, maybe going back and believing in some divinity who will help me along.”

In India, Martel opened himself up to what he calls a “faith that this is not just a flat, chemical reality, the result of chance. That is probably true, but why not believe there actually is meaning to it? What do I lose by believing in Jesus or Buddha, all mixed in? Richard Dawkins will mock me, but it doesn’t bother me being mushy-headed. I let everyone lead their own little lives.”

Keen not to be seen as a guru, he tells readers at events that Life of Pi is “a literary exploration of faith,” rather than a message. So when an animal appears in his work, it isn’t a transparent symbol. In Part 3 of High Mountains, a Canadian senator, grieving the loss of his wife, adopts a chimp and moves to rural Portugal. The ape’s name is Odo — evoking Samuel Beckett’s famously opaque Waiting for Godot. “There is something troubling in looking at [chimpanzees], and they are as complex as a book,” he says. “There are interpretations possible.”