The four pages of blurbs in my paperback copy of Life of Pi, a novel by Yann Martel, though all adoring of the book, give scattered, bewildered, and generally unhelpful impressions of what it is actually about.

The New Yorker calls it “an impassioned defense of zoos;” the Wall Street Journal likens it to “comic strip ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ with an overt religious theme;” the Financial Times (London) claims it “suggests Joseph Conrad and Salman Rushdie hallucinating together over the meaning of The Old Man and the Sea and Gulliver’s Travels.” Yann Martel, the author, in his Author’s Note (part, secretly, of the novel) at the beginning of the book, is introduced by a mysterious elderly stranger named Francis Adirubasamy in a coffee shop in Pondicherry to what he is told is “a story that will make you believe in God”— and thus, when the reader is not sure which has been raised higher, his expectations or, proverbially, his eyebrow, he is launched into Chapter 1, which begins with a long and vaguely academic discussion of the eating and sleeping habits of the three-toed Brazilian sloth.

The reader voyages through this novel unprepared.

Martel takes to heart the idea of splitting up a book into three parts and each, though nearly identical in style and format to the others, is practically a different book. Part 1 is primarily a refreshing, lively account of the protagonist Pi’s upbringing in Pondicherry, and his experiences with religion, family and his father’s zoo, interspersed with a portrait of his adulthood in Canada: his double major of religious studies and zoology, and his family in Toronto. This is funny and philosophical and light, and the reader zips through it with a smile on his face, but wondering when he will encounter what the Times of London called a story “so harrowing and astonishing that it will make you believe imagination might be the first step (to believing in God).”

Part 1 ends with young Pi and his family boarding a ship headed to Canada, laden with the zoo animals his father is selling along the way. Then comes an account of the fictionalized narrator, Martel, meeting the adult Pi and his wife and children. The last line, from Martel’s perspective: “This story has a happy ending.”

The first line of Part 2: “The ship sank.”

Part 2 continues in this vein. Here is the harrowing story of adventure and survival we were promised, always simultaneously playful and truly terrifying, drawing almost exclusively on the themes introduced in Part 1, and yet the reader feels that the two parts have nothing in common, except for occasional and subtle reminders of the larger, philosophical points Martel is trying to make, the overarching narrative that unites all the disparate elements of the book. But these are swept aside in the Robinson Crusoe-style adventure story that makes part 2 enjoyable to read. As Pi’s voyage across the Pacific Ocean alone with a tiger progresses, he grows weaker and more tired, and his exploits grow steadily more fantastic, until he, a hallucinating castaway who has been alone with little food for many months, is hardly a credible narrator, and his connection to reality mirrors the weakness of his grasp on survival. The reader’s relationship with him changes. But just when his story is at its wildest, most surreal, Part 2 abruptly ends. He tells us, in its penultimate chapter, “I grew weary of my situation… The rest of this story is nothing but grief, ache and endurance.” Then he effectively skips the details of the remainder of his voyage and the final chapter of Part 2 begins with his arrival on land.

Finally there is Part 3, the most brilliant and rewarding of the lot. Martel magically, supernaturally seems to draw all of the bizarre themes and subplots of the book into a beautiful, resounding message or meditation on the subject of reality, storytelling, religion, truth, and so much more — but here I fall into the trap of the reviewer of this book: since I can’t explain what actually happens at the end of this book, I’ll just have to leave it infuriatingly ambiguous, and ask you to read the book to experience it for yourself, armed with one more strange set of preconceptions as you go in, given to you by this reviewer in the hope that your adventure through this work of fiction will be as surprising and unexpected as Pi’s through the wonderful waters Martel has created for him.