'I think there are four kinds of reviews. All in all, I am sensing disaster here.Īpart from an 'Oooh' (or maybe 'Pwooh') at being accused of stupidity by Sexton, he takes it philosophically. Martel is keen to see the review, as he has heard about it but has yet to read it. I have taken along a review by David Sexton, literary editor of the London Evening Standard and a critic with impeccable taste, who had accused Martel of being 'not very bright' because of a quote in which he said the monkey and donkey which feature in the taxidermist's clunky play, large chunks of which appear in the novel, were appropriate representatives of Jews because they embody mental nimbleness and stubbornness respectively. The general view is that pretty well all fictional treatments of the Holocaust are doomed, and that this one – about a blocked writer who meets a taxidermist writing a play about 'the horrors' who is probably a former Nazi seeking some sort of catharsis – is more doomed than most.

In the US the reviews were what one politely calls 'mixed' in the UK they have been uniformly hostile. The inescapable fact about the book, Martel's long-awaited follow-up to Life of Pi, is that it has not been very well received.

I'd only finished his book the night before – reaching its dramatic denouement in the bath, if you must know – and feel at something of a disadvantage in talking about it, since he spent eight years labouring over it. Martel, the Canadian author who won the Booker prize for the outrageously successful Life of Pi in 2002, takes all this more or less in his stride, though he is a little put out by my incompetence and fractiousness – I rather rudely insist that the young woman who is steering him round the UK and Ireland on the publicity tour for his new novel, Beatrice and Virgil, absent herself from the room while we talk. I have no idea how to turn it off, and eventually have to ask the concierge to dispose of it. There is an additional problem that my new BlackBerry keeps ringing. I am conscious of the fact we may be speaking too loud. A woman packs up and moves to the other side of the room at Yann Martel's first mention of genocide. T alking about the Holocaust at nine in the morning in the elegant lounge of a trendy boutique hotel in central London is not ideal.

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