Chimpanzee, Rhinoceros, and a Vintage Renault 
 I have not read 
 Life of Pi 
 , nor seen the movie, so cannot say if Yann Martel's latest is as good as his Man Booker prizewinning novel about a tiger and a boy in a small boat. But I was certainly not disappointed in this one, which offers a charming blend of faith and fable, coupled once more with an unusual bestiary, from odd-looking automobiles to even less common animals. Whatever I felt about the book narratively--it tends to amble rather than advance--I found I was glad to spend as much time with Martel as he cared to give. 
 The book is called as a novel, but really it is three novellas of a hundred pages or so, set in different time periods, and each of a rather different genre. They are connected by their setting--the so-called High Mountains of Portugal, which turns out to be a boulder-strewn savanna with not a mountain in sight. They are connected by the appearance in each of members of the same family, though you have to read deep into each story to discover how. They are connected too by a common concern with religion--far from doctrinaire Christianity, but illuminated by the sense that faith matters, and that doubt matters even more. Martel also connects them through their titles, which indicate the overall arc of the book: Homeless, Homeward, and Home. And the sense of final homecoming is both beautiful and real. 
 "Homeless," set in 1904, is a quest. A young archivist named Tomas has discovered some letters from a 17th-century Portuguese priest on an African mission, filled with his reactions to the slave trade, his doubts about his faith, and reports about an unusual native crucifix that Tomas believes was sent to a church in the High Mountains. So he reluctantly accepts the loan of his uncle's brand new Renault, even though he is baffled by the operation of the "steerage wheel," amazed at the amount of "moto-naphtha" needed to run it, and as for the technical terms, "did not the Iberian Peninsula get enough torque with Grand Inquisitor Torquemada?" His struggles with the car are comic though a bit prolonged. But when Tomas reaches his destination, you will see that his role as an inept driver was an important one to establish. 
 Oddly enough, although very little happens in "Homeward," set on New Year's Eve of 1938-39, it gripped me totally from beginning to end. You would hardly think that a middle-aged pathologist receiving a midnight visit from his wife, who talks for over thirty pages about the Gospels as parallels to Agatha Christie stories would exactly seize you by the lapels, but I was fascinated by the woman's arguments, and her theology was not trivial either. That is only the start; even stranger things will happen before the novella ends. Best say no more. 
 In the final story, set in 1988, a widowed Canadian senator, tired of politics, adopts a chimpanzee and travels with him to his ancestral village. It is a beautiful tale, just teetering on the edge of sappiness but never quite going there. In all senses, geographical, spiritual, and human, it amply earns its title, "Home." And that is more than enough for me.