SOURCE: Innes, Charlotte. “Robinson Crusoe, Move Over.” Nation 275, no. 6 (19 August 2002): 25-9.

In the following review, Innes discusses the themes of religious faith and doubt in The Life of Pi.

If Canadian writer Yann Martel were a preacher, he'd be charismatic, funny and convert all the nonbelievers. He baits his readers with serious themes and trawls them through a sea of questions and confusion, but he makes one laugh so much, and at times feel so awed and chilled, that even thrashing around in bewilderment or disagreement one can't help but be captured by his prose.

That's largely why I took such pleasure in Life of Pi, Martel's wonderful second novel, which playfully reworks the ancient sea voyage, castaway themes of classics like Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Melville's Moby-Dick and (in some of its more fantastical aspects) Homer's The Odyssey...