I got around to reading Yann Martel's Life of Pi in the past few weeks. The book has been out for something like four years now, and I've been wanting to read it ever since I first heard of it. Finally, after years of, for whatever reason, not reading it, I grabbed my little brother's second-hand copy of the hardcover edition and got reading.

Warning: Spoilers ahead...

I'm a big fan of a good high-concept adventure - a story where the basic premise can be easily described in a couple of words, and those words sound pretty amazing. The "high concept" behind Life of Pi is this: "Kid. Tiger. Lifeboat." Awesome.

Author Yann Martel's voice is unique, clever, and decidedly Indian. The novel is like a Bollywood musical: rich and colorful, swinging like a pendulum from the depths of tragedy to surreal comedy in mere paragraphs. It makes for an exciting read, but also makes the whole effort seem slightly unfocused.

I've got a thing for good survivor stories, as well as a bit of a thing for high-seas adventure, as well as a bit of thing for stories about humans co-existing with animals — not in a cutesy sort of way, but more in a survival manner — and especially with big cats. So, naturally, I was drawn to the "kid, tiger, lifeboat" book. Life of Pi, however, is more than just "kid, tiger, lifeboat." With the exception of the occasional flashback/forward, we don't even get to the lifeboat until a little over 100 pages into the 300-page novel.

The entire first third of the book is told as a kind of memoir of, well, the life of Pi, our hero, in Pondicherry. His father ran the zoo, his father's friend was a swimmer, he was named after a swimming pool, he is a Catholic, a Muslim and a Hindu. It's all fascinating, and at times very clever, but it has next to nothing to do with the events on the boat.

We learn that the family is moving with many of their animals to work at a zoo in Canada, our novel's device-of-choice for sinking a boat full of animals. And once we're on the lifeboat, things still never quite become exactly what you might expect. Besides our hero and the tiger, there's a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, turtles, and several species of fish including sharks in and around the boat during the middle chunk of the novel - and nearly every one of them meets a rather bloody end.

For a fairly long stretch of the novel, we simply follow Pi and his arkfull of creatures as food supplies slowly run out. It's actually very interesting, and Martel's prose is elegant and beautiful throughout, but the plot never really sufficiently thickens. Boy is hungry, tiger is hungry, bloody death of an animal, feed the tiger, feed the boy, lather, rinse, repeat. Things do get interesting and borderline sci-fi when Pi stumbles upon a giant floating island oasis made entirely out of algae, but it's like a tease almost, making you wish that more of the book had been so bizarre and fantastical.