Life of Pi Yan, 'Life of Pi' is told from two alternating points of view, the main character Pi in a flashback and Yann Martel himself, who is the "visiting writer" (Martel 101) interviewing Pi many years after the tiger in the boat story. This technique of the intrusive narrator adds the documentary realism to the book, setting up, like a musical counter-point, the myth-making, unreliable narrator, Pi. The reader is left to ponder at the end whether Pi's story is an allegory of another set of parallel events. The novel is a work of fiction set in the summer of 1977 that
Booker Prize following week. In 1994, "Guardian" literary editor Richard Gott, citing the lack of objective criteria and the exclusion of American authors, described the prize as "a significant and dangerous iceberg in the sea of British culture that serves as a symbol of its current malaise." In 1997, the decision to award Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things" proved controversial. Carmen Callil, chair of the previous year's Booker judges, called it an "execrable" book and said on television that it shouldn't even have been on the shortlist. Booker Prize chairman Martyn Goff said Roy won because nobody objected, following the