More proof that Yann Martel is a literary paper tiger

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The Booker is much to blame.

Yann Martel was almost entirely unknown as a writer when, in 2002, he won the prize for Life of Pi , the story of an Indian boy castaway in a boat for 227 days with a big Bengal tiger for company, an allegory of the hazardous odyssey of the soul.

Shortly after his victory, Martel said: “I feel like Jesus Christ after he’s done his three days in Hell, I feel like a boy who has just discovered the joys of self-abuse, I feel like Sir Edmund Hillary after he’s stumbled to the top of Everest, all three joys all at once.” Justifiably, perhaps.

For Life of Pi went on to sell 15 million copies in 50 languages and to be filmed in 3D by Ang Lee — the movie took $609 million at the box office.

No other author’s fortunes have been so transformed by a prize.

Martel’s subsequent career has been less brilliant.

His proposal for a follow-up, a flip book about the Holocaust, one half to be an absurdist play about a monkey and a donkey’s sufferings in the “Horrors”, the other half to be an essay arguing for more imaginative representations of the Holocaust, was rejected by his American publishers.

The book he went on to publish in 2010, Beatrice and Virgil — Beatrice being the donkey, Virgil a howler monkey, both stuffed by a Nazi taxidermist — was extraordinarily crass.

Reviewing it in these pages I wondered if Martel was just not very bright.

His next novel, The High Mountains of Portugal of 2016, makes a chimpanzee into a Christ-like figure in three different epochs, on an antique crucifix in 1904, inside a corpse in 1938, and as a companion to a Canadian lawyer with heart disease in 1981.

Or so I understand, having resisted this treat.

Although this time, at least, Martel’s tale is about people, he can’t resist his animal flourishes once again, randomly introducing camels, giraffes, elephants, wildebeest, porcupines and chameleons into the poem and notes.

And, to be sure, we’re told that The Psoad is spiritual like the Gospels (“Troy: Jerusalem; Psoas: Jesus”) too.

So: high concept, low achievement.

“I might have been left to my ways if it hadn’t been for the bizarre success of Life of Pi,” Martel once said.

Now there’s an alternative world that’s a truly dreamy prospect.

Son of Nobody by Yann Martel is out now (Canongate, £20)