Religion has become fashionable again in literary fiction with the Life of Pi winning the Man Booker award. The main theme of his novel, as Martel pointed out at the prize function, was the power of faith. "We all know what’s wrong with religion, most people know just about enough about it to dismiss it, but we forget what is right about it—it wouldn’t have lasted this long otherwise," he said. Martel was so afraid that readers would be "allergic to religious talk" that he cut short in an earlier Canadian edition what now forms the first half of the book: Pi’s simultaneous conversion to Islam and Christianity, while still a believing Hindu. His publishers in the UK eventually persuaded him to re-insert the original text, despite Martel’s qualms. Martel started out as an atheist but somewhere along the writing of Pi, researching the founding texts of Islam, Christianity and Hinduism, he became converted to the power of faith. "A good religion works like a good novel: it makes you suspend your disbelief," he told an interviewer.
Riled with media accusations of "dumbing down" the Booker prize, one of the judges went to the press with a longish piece justifying their choice. Russell Celyn Jones, a novelist and crime fiction writer, says while literary fiction can sometimes be popular, populist fiction can never be literary. His definition of a literary novel: "They cannot be prescribed by a publisher: they are what they are, and are usually like nothing else."
