Yann Martel’s follow-up novel to the hugely successful Man Booker prize-winning Life of Pi is a fascinating exploration into the nature of storytelling, the imperatives that drive the artist to produce and the moral implications of their work. But this perhaps makes it sound dry and academic, which it is definitely not. Martel’s straightforward, self-referential style is highly engaging; leading the reader on literary adventures that are vaguely uncomfortable, sometimes uncertain, but ultimately rewarding.

Our narrator is Henry, author of a very successful second novel who spent five years working on a third book about the Holocaust. Determined to do his best by the subject, he is compelled to use all means at his disposal and so writes in two forms – an essay and a novel – with the aim of having them printed together in one work. He hopes to give the reader a choice about how to engage with the subject: ‘Readers inclined to seek help and reassurance in reason would perhaps read the essay first. Those more comfortable with the more directly emotional approach of fiction might rather start with the novel.’ But his book is badly received by his publisher and losing faith in his vision he gives up: ‘the urge left him’, it wasn’t so much writer’s block, as, in his words, ‘writer’s abandonment’.

With his pregnant wife, he takes the opportunity to travel to an unnamed city, in an unnamed country of the world: ‘a storied metropolis where all kinds of people find themselves and lose themselves.’ He finds work in a chocolate shop, joins an amateur theatre company, takes up clarinet lessons and occasionally, surreptitiously returns to his manuscript, but without the urgency or desire that had previously compelled him. He continues to receive and respond to letters from readers of his first novel, finding pleasure in their responses, while vaguely floating, unable to reconnect with his work.

But then he receives an unusual letter containing a story by Flaubert and a scene from an unknown play. Despite being disturbed by the lack of a moral core in the nature of Flaubert’s story and uncertain how it is relevant to the play, Henry keeps being drawn back to it. Realising it was sent from within the city he is now living, he ventures to seek the author out. It is this journey that leads him to meet another man called Henry, an amateur playwright and professional taxidermist. When he enters the taxidermy shop, ‘a tingle of excitement passed through him. Now here was a stage full of stories’. And shrugging off a vague sense of unease, and a seeming lack of emotional connection, Henry begins to assist his new ‘friend’ to write a story about man’s relentless destruction of animals. For he is convinced that his namesake is using animals metaphorically as he himself had done (yes, Henry’s last novel was a successful book that featured wild animals), and that he is also attempting to tell a deeply personal tale about the horrors of the Holocaust.

But is Henry projecting his desire for creative enlightenment on a man who cannot help him? What compels him to write? And how can words, those ‘muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field’, ever hope to convey the soaring heights and depraved depths of human behaviour?