I dont usually read books that win prizes, because most of them are written with the express intention of winning a prize and therefore sound very pedantic and make for dreadful reading. However, I decided to give this one a whirl, because the theme was so unusual-a boy and an adult tiger surviving together in a lifeboat, without the former becoming the latter’s dinner!
I dont know what I expected when I started, but I found the first few chapters extremely slow, and had some difficulty in wading through all the introductory stuff. A lot of religious sentimentalism finds its way into the novel, for no particular reason as far as the main theme is concerned! The fact that there was a thin vein of self-mockery running through the entire narration helped me to continue. But once the hero (the narrator) got on to the ship (bound for Canada) with his family and their circus animals, the tempo picked up, and then it was a matter of my wanting to find out what happened next! As a result, I zipped through the latter two-thirds of the book in a jiffy!
While the story of how the hero survived with the tiger in the same lifeboat for a period of months sounds plausible while you read the novel, I have serious doubts whether a naturalist would agree with all the assumptions that are made vis a vis wild animals! For example, the hero strives to achieve an alpha-omega relationship with the tiger, as is found in packs of wolves and in prides of lions. However, tigers are solitary animals and not prone to accepting a social hierarchy. At least, that is what I have understood from limited reading about these animals, and I would love to hear what a professional has to say on this matter!
Coming back to the book, it makes wonderful reading, as I already mentioned. The author has used a clever device, of going through the whole story as if it was narrated to him by the hero. This gives the story an aura of realism, making it impossible to differentiate fact from fiction! This is definitely not a book for small children, despite the fantasy-like storyline. I would recommend it to anyone who is totally fed up of all the boom-boom and skulduggery in modern novels!