SOURCE: Kaveney, Roz. “Guess Who's for Dinner.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5180 (19 July 2002): 25.

In the following mixed review of The Life of Pi, Kaveney argues that the discussions of religious issues within the novel are unconvincing.

Sometimes, the best part of a novel is not the elaborate constructions which go to create a plausible fictional world, but the single mad sentence that might be used to pitch the screenplay in Hollywood. In the case of Yann Martel's Life of Pi, the thing that makes the book memorable is not the overly cute, bordering on patronizing, narrative of how his hero Pi came to take his name, adopt many religions and grow up in Pondicherry as the son of a zoo-keeper. It is the story of how he manages to survive for eight-and-a-half months in an open boat in the Pacific in the company of an adult Bengal tiger, keeping...