Rabbit Potter Is God

"Christianity had a reputation for few gods and great violence. But good schools. ......Islam had a reputation worse than Christianity’s – fewer gods, greater violence and I had never heard anyone say anything good about Muslim schools."

I'll be honest, I missed some of the deeper meaning and allegorical references in this book until after I'd read the last chapter and some very interesting reviews. But having discovered that a lot of people read the book believing the statement in the foreword that the story told in the book is a true story, I feel a little less silly. Great imaginative story with some moments of true descriptive brilliance, told at a deceptively pedestrian pace. Yann Martel has recently been given $3m for rights to publish his new novel, another allegorical story based on the holocaust which features a monkey and a donkey in a taxidermy shop, apparently. And Ang Lee has just agreed to film a 3D version of Life of Pi over the next 18 months. It's all go now that I've finally gotten around to reading it.

By way of accidental contrast, between bouts of technical and operational book devouring and job hunting asceticism, I'm reading this at the moment. For an entirely different reason than musical snobbery, I'll never be able to listen to another Kylie Minogue song without grimacing ever again.

100 pages in and the writing and story line hasn't been overly impressive so far. But snippets of hectic dialogue and some truly bizarre guerilla imagery keep me coming back;

"The giraffe was struck by lightening Dad, at the zoo. It's quite common on the veldts of Africa. They cop it all the time. They act like lightening rods. One minute they are minding their own business, the next minute they're jelly"

Again I'm left trying to bridge unbridgeable narrative gaps, knitting the smoke and the flames of completely unrelated stories, but with related elements, together. Flying zebras, baboons, tigers, muslim meerkats, hyenas, scorched giraffes. For my next trick and the sake of my sanity I might try reading a book in a recognised series and then read the next one. Harry Rabbit Potter At Rest With A Dragon Tattoo II maybe.