Writing about religion can be a tricky business. If you're too controversial, you're pretty much guaranteed to upset an awful lot of people (although it never did Dan Brown any harm). Go too far the other way, and it can all seem a bit dogmatic, alienating a large proportion of your potential readership. However, strike the right balance, and you could just end up with a story that challenges and provokes its readers as much as it entertains them - this is almost certainly what Yann Martel has achieved here.

We spend the first third or so of this book becoming familiar with the central character, Pi Patel - Pi as in 3.14..., adopted to avoid the mocking of his early years at school, in which his full name, Piscine, was unfortunately mis-pronounced.

We learn slowly about the world Pi inhabits, and through the family's Zoo in Pondicherry, India, about the ways of animals, and their relationship with humans. Martel writes with a patient, unpretentious style, steadily strolling along, turning over new ideas like stones on a beach, playing with concepts in Pi's world and ours.

From here, we are taken to the day when Pi's family decided to leave India; to sell the Zoo and its animals, and move to Canada. Joining them on the boat were a number of creatures, they too heading for their new lives on the American continent.

Here Pi's experiences in the Zoo come to the fore - it is his relationship with the animals, and the animals' with each other, that makes this something more than a regular "cast-away" story - there is food and water onboard, enough to last a reasonable amount of time, so it's not likely to be hunger or thirst that gets to Pi. Rather, the operation of this bizarre and extraordinarilly mixed-up animal cage is going to be the factor that dominates proceedings.

A short chapter from the book seems to bear this out:

Of course, with all such books of apparent subtextual depth, it is easy to go way beyond the author's original intentions, and place too much emphasis on things of little true significance. But this is the beauty of this book - as a story of one boy and his incredible adventures, it holds up as a superbly-told, well plotted, entertaining and innovative novel (albeit one that takes a little while to become really interesting, and requires some patience). If you want to read something more into it, there's plenty to go on - and for this duality, as well as the essential quality of the tale, this has to be one of the best books I've read in an awful long time.