Life of Pi is a literary novel which means that it follows fewer rules than genre-based fiction. With romances, murder mysteries, thrillers, etc. Literary novels plumb the depths of life.
The novel is an exploration of particular questions, and each of my novels has explored one particular question I was interested in. In my 30s I travelled through India, and for the first time was puzzled by religion: in an age of science and technology and the triumph of these, I was intrigued that something as obscure as religion would endure.
I realized that art and religion operate in similar ways. Stories are important in both literature and religious belief. That ranged from looking at animal behavior, biology, reading castaway stories, and finding information about survival at sea. I explored a whole range of subjects. I wrote copious notes, jotted down quotations, and also travelled extensively in India.
I did on the ground research, studying Indian English and really getting India under my skin. I also spent a lot of time in the library at McGill University whilst I was living in Montreal doing more theoretical research. There are three broad strands of research β zoology, religion and survival at sea β and I realized it was way too much to fit all of it into the novel.
In the actual chapters, I would only use a fraction of that research but I gained a huge amount of knowledge and could definitely impersonate a zookeeper in my mind! The process generated about pages of notes on a Word document, which also consisted of ideas for scenes, dialogue, observations and ideas. Once I had all of that information, printed on paper, I then used scissors to cut up all the research and put it in different envelopes, depending on where they belong in the novel.
