101 Letters to a Prime Minister (7 page)

Answering such troubling questions—the Holy Grail of theodicy—remains as troubling then as now. Perhaps the answer still is that we lack perspective, that in a way that we mortals just can’t understand, great evil is part of a divine plan and makes ultimate sense.

In the meantime, until God comes down and fully explains that plan, evil galls. Voltaire was religiously outraged by the Lisbon earthquake. For him it was clear: there was no Providence, there was no God. To be eternally optimistic in the face of great evil and suffering was not only insensitive to its victims, but morally and intellectually untenable. He set to prove it in the story of Candide, the naive young man from Thunder-ten-tronckh, in Westphalia, who could have had as his motto “All is for the best,” such an optimist was he at the start of the novel. Wait till you see all the catastrophes that befall him. The novel ends, when all has been said and done and suffered, with a simple call to quiet, peaceable and collective work: “we must go and work in the garden,” “il faut cultiver notre jardin.”

That call still stands as perhaps the only practical solution to what we can do in the face of evil: spend our time simply, fruitfully and with others.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

V
OLTAIRE
(1694–1778), born François-Marie Arouet, was a French Enlightenment writer and philosopher. He was immensely prolific, writing novels, poetry, plays, essays, scientific papers and historical works. Voltaire was politically active, supporting social reform, free trade, civil liberties and freedom of religion. He was a fierce critic of the Catholic Church. His satire got him into trouble: in 1717, he
was imprisoned for eleven months in the Bastille for criticizing the French government; and in 1726 he was exiled from France for three years for insulting a member of the aristocracy. He is buried in the Pantheon in Paris.

Dear Mr. Harper,

You said a few years ago that your favourite book was the
Guinness Book of World Records
. Well, as a dedicated reader of those yearly volumes that means that at least on one occasion you read a poem. Simon Armitage, the editor of
Short and Sweet: 101 Very Short Poems
, the latest book I am sending you, says in his introduction that he became interested in very short poetry as a teenager when he read in the aforementioned
Guinness
book what was claimed to be the world’s shortest poem:

A masterpiece, isn’t it? In a single rhyming couplet of four syllables something is suggested about the ancient and intimate relations between humans and animals, about the great antiquity of small, neglected beings, about the shabby reality of our existence, divine origins notwithstanding, and the corruption of this world, inherent even in the Garden of Eden. And there’s more: in that rhyme that sounds like “Adam, Adam,” is there not a lament? Or is it an accusation? Either way, it could be that the fleas in question are us.

You can’t beat poetry for saying so much with so little.

Busy? Tired? Feeling nothing? You’re missing on the depth of life that you know is out there but you don’t have time to read a big fat novel? Then try this poem, by George Mackay Brown:

Notice the extraordinary concision with which a narrative structure is set up, with the emotional questions and possibilities left to ripple through the reader’s mind. The marvel of poetry is that it can be as short as a question yet as powerful as an answer. For example, the following poem, by Stephen Crane:

I envy that of poets, that ability to create something so small that nevertheless feels so complete, the vastness of existence made to fit into something no bigger than a coin purse. Look at this poem, by Hugo Williams:

Repetition suits poetry. Read one of these poems several times and you’ll see for yourself: it keeps getting better. In this case, familiarity breeds respect.

A last one, lovely, by Wendy Cope:

Short though they are, I wouldn’t rush through any of these poems. Rush tends to disturb their echoing stillness. Best to read them aloud, getting the rhythm right, smoothing out the stumbles, slowly getting a sense of their sense.

It’s a marvellous exercise in—in what?—in being human, I suppose.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

S
IMON
A
RMITAGE
(b. 1963) is a British poet, novelist and playwright known for his dry wit and accessible style. He is the author of nine books of poetry, and has written and presented works for radio and television. He has earned multiple awards for his poetry,
including the
Sunday Times
Author of the Year Award, a Forward Poetry Prize, a Lannan Award, an Ivor Novello Award and the title of the UK’s Millennium Poet for his poem “Killing Time.” Armitage has been a judge for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Dear Mr. Harper,

When I found a used copy of the latest book that I’m sending you, I was pleased that it was a hard cover—a first after eight paperbacks—but I was disappointed with the cover artwork.
^*
Surely,
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
, the short novel by the great Gabriel García Márquez, deserves better than this awkward job. Who chose the purple? It’s all so hideous. But you can’t judge a book by its cover, isn’t that right?

Which is a nice way of broaching the topic of clichés.

A cliché, to remind you, is a worn, hackneyed phrase or opinion. At one time, perhaps in the Middle Ages among monks slowly copying books by hand in a monastery, the notion that nothing of substance can be judged by its surface, expressed in terms of a bound stack of paper and its protective shell, must
have seemed like a dazzling revelation that had the monks looking at each other in amazement and rushing out to sing in full-throated worship to
urbi et orbi
: “Praise be to God! A book can’t be judged by its cover! Hallelujah, hallelujah!”

But now, even among people who don’t read a book a year, it’s a cliché, it’s a lazy, thoughtless way of expressing oneself.

Sometimes clichés are unavoidable. “I love you”—a sentence that is foundational to the well-being of every human being, the “you” being another person, a group of people, a grand notion or cause, a god, or simply a reflection in the mirror—is a cliché. Every actor who has to say the line struggles to deliver it in a way that makes it sound fresh, like Adam saying it for the first time to Eve. But there’s no good way of saying it otherwise—and no one really tries to. We live very well with “I love you” because the syntactical simplicity of it—one each of subject, verb, object, nothing else—nicely matches its intended truthfulness. So we happily blurt out the cliché, some of us repeating it several times, for emphasis, or some of us saying it all the time, for example at the end of every phone call with a family member. Lovers at a balcony, sons and daughters at war, dervishes whirling—they’re all living “I love you” in a way that is not clichéd but essential.

But otherwise clichés should be avoided like the West Nile virus. Why? Because they are stale and flat, and because they are contagious. Convenient writerly shortcuts, hurried means of signifying “you know what I mean,” clichés at first are just a froth of tiny white eggs in the ink of your pen, incubated slowly by the warmth of your lazy fingers. The harm to your prose is slight, and people are forgiving. But convenience, shortcuts and hurry are no way to write true words, and if you are not careful—and it is hard work to be careful—the eggs multiply, bloom and enter your blood.

The damage can be serious. The infection can spread to your eyes, to your nose, to your tongue, to your ears, to your skin, and worse: to your brain and to your heart. It’s no longer just your words, written and spoken, that are conventional, conformist, unoriginal, dull. Now it’s your very thoughts and feelings that have lost their heartbeat. In the most serious cases, the person can no longer even see or feel the world directly, but can only perceive it through the reductive, muffling filter of cliché.

At this stage, the cliché attains its political dimension: dogmatism. Dogmatism in politics has exactly the same effect as the cliché in writing: it prevents the soul from interacting openly and honestly with the world, with that pragmatism that lets in fresh all the beautiful, bountiful messiness of life.

The cliché and dogmatism—two related banes that all writers and politicians should avoid if we are to serve well our respective constituencies.

As for the García Márquez book, I got it for you because of your recent trip to—and renewed interest in—Latin America. The man’s a genius.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

G
ABRIEL
G
ARCÍA
M
ÁRQUEZ
(b. 1927) is an internationally acclaimed novelist, short story writer, screenplay writer, memoirist and journalist. During his long literary career, he has been credited with popularizing the “magical realism” writing style. Márquez, nicknamed “Gabo,” sets his stories in Latin America and often addresses the themes of isolation, love and memory. His best-known works are
One Hundred Years of Solitude
and
Love in the Time of Cholera
. He
is also well known for his political activism. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. Raised in Colombia, he now lives in Mexico City.

Dear Mr. Harper,

One day when August Strindberg was still a student at the University of Uppsala, he received a surprising summons: King Karl XV wanted to see him. Strindberg put on his best suit and made the short trip to the Royal Palace in Stockholm. The twenty-two-year-old was from an undistinguished family, he was very poor, and his academic achievements were perfectly average, but the King of Sweden had his reasons for wanting to meet him: he was keen on the arts and he had seen a performance of a historical play that Strindberg had written,
The Outlaw
, and he had liked it. In fact, he had liked it so much that he promised the young man a quarterly stipend so that he could finish his university studies. Strindberg was delighted. Alas, after only two payments and without any explanation, the royal bounty dried up. So it goes. Strindberg dropped out of university.

By all accounts, Strindberg was a miserable sod. He had a boundless capacity to be unhappy, especially in his relations
with women. But he also had a mind of immense energy, intelligence and originality, and he wrote brilliant plays.

A brilliant play is something very peculiar. Drama is the most oral of literary forms, far less of an artifice than the short story, the novel or the poem, and far less reliant on publication to fully come into its own; what really counts for a play is not that it be read, but that it be seen, in the flesh. In many ways, life has all the trappings of a play: when you, Mr. Harper, enter the House of Commons, for example, you are walking onto a stage. And you are there because you are playing a role, the lead role. And it is because you are playing that role that you rise and speak. And then in Hansard the next day it reads like a play. It is the same for all of us in life: we move about on various stages, we take on various roles, and we speak. But there is a crucial difference, of course, one that goes to the core of what art is: in a play there is structure and meaning, put there by the playwright, while in life, even after many acts, the structure and meaning is hard to find. Some claim to know of a great playwright who has authored our existence, but even for them structure and meaning remains an ongoing challenge.

So while a play approximates life to a great degree, it is in other ways nothing like life. No one speaks with the concise completeness of the dramatis personae of a play, neither in ways that so quickly yet subtly reveal their character, nor with a tempo that so rises and falls until a climax, nor, usually, in a space so confined as a stage’s. In a phrase: life is a play that doesn’t make sense, while a play is life that does.