I finished "Life of Pi"

So I finished "Life of Pi" - once I finally got more than two consecutive minutes of consciousness on my hands, I plowed through it at my usual rate. What a wonderful book this is. If you have not read it yourself, leave now, go buy it, and then come back once you've read it. To meditate in the way that I wish to, I must spoil the story.

The book is very spare in establishing Pi's person - everything about him that is important is in some way tied to his journey. Everything from his childhood swimming lessons, the basic lesson in primal zoology he gets from his father, his own observations of animals as a zookeeper's son, and his varied religious conversions all play essential roles that make Pi's telling of his journey on the seas with Richard Parker meaningful.

Pi believes in God. But he also recognizes Atheists as brethren of a kind, who just walk a different path. Those who he really has no time for are agnostics - those who cannot choose. Pi believes that inevitably, you have to make a choice. This is important at the very end of the story - when Pi has finished his story the way he wants to tell it, the skeptical Japanese investigators are so unwilling to give it credence that Pi tells them a second story, similar in many ways to the first. It is more believable, but the story is cold and lacks much of the profundity and meaning of his first story.

In short, the author has cleverly put before us the agnostic moment Pi refers to earlier. He says to the incredulous investigators that he has given them two stories that account for the exact amount of time he was at sea: now they must choose. The first story is tragic, heroic and mythological; the second is tragic, to be sure, but disturbing and grim. Now the reader must choose as well.

And on the last page, the investigators do choose - they choose to believe. Yann Martel's author-figure is told at the book's outset that the story he is about to hear will make the hearer believe in God, and it either does, or it does not.

But it does not leave you doubting.