101 Letters to a Prime Minister (14 page)

The evidence from
Birthday Letters
is clear: X really did love Y, so if art can redeem, here is redemption.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

T
ED
H
UGHES
(1930–1998) was a children’s writer, dramatist, short story writer, critic and acclaimed poet, holding the position of British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death. Hughes’s earlier poetry, including his first collection,
Hawk Roosting
, focused on beauty and violence in nature, while his later collections, like
Crow
, were existential, satirical and cynical. He wrote more than ninety books, and received a Guggenheim fellowship, the Whitbread Prize for Poetry and the Order of Merit.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Your classic this week is a somewhat harder read than most of the other books I have sent you. Many books are direct and frontal in their approach; immediately upon starting them, a reader senses what the author wants to talk about. To take an example from the books on your shelf, we are immediately familiar with the setting of George Orwell’s
Animal Farm
, even if we’ve never lived on a farm, and we see right away his allegorical intent. We appreciate that a real event, the tragedy of Soviet Russia under Stalin, is going to be examined by means of a fable set on an imaginary farm. Armed with that understanding, animated by certain expectations, we read on.

Books such as these, the majority of books I’d say, create a subtle interplay of familiarity and strangeness. The familiar brings the reader onboard, and then the strange takes that reader somewhere new. The two elements are necessary. A book that proves to be entirely familiar is boring. Even the most formulaic of genre fiction attempts to convey some feeling of uncertainty
and then, only at the very end, reassures the reader that everything is as he or she would wish it to be, the boy getting the girl or the detective catching the murderer. Conversely, a book can’t be entirely strange, otherwise the reader would have no entry point, would flounder and give up.

Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse
, published in 1927, will have you floundering a bit. Please don’t give up. For me, it starts working, it takes you in, on about the twentieth page (that is, on page 29 of the edition I’m sending you). Before that, you’ll be puzzled, perhaps even vaguely annoyed. So many characters coming and going, no clear plot in sight, tangents and digressions aplenty—where is the clarity and pace of good old Victorian literature? What is Woolf up to?

Well, it’s anyone’s guess—good literature is forever open to interpretation—but by my reckoning Woolf is exploring at least two things here:

Woolf’s prose is dense, detailed and repetitive, but in a mesmerizing way. Not surprisingly, another of Woolf’s novels is called
The Waves
. Her novel is like that, lulling and mysterious.

It’s always nice to know a little about the author of a book. Virginia Woolf was English. She was born in 1882 and she died in 1941 by suicide. She was mad at times and mad most of the time; that is, she was periodically plagued by mental illness and she was always angry at the limitations placed upon women. Virginia Woolf was a bold, experimental writer and a feminist figurehead of great importance.

One indication both of Woolf’s literary approach and of her character is her fondness for the semi-colon. The period is final and unsubtle, might be termed masculine. The comma, on the other hand, is feminine as some men might want women to be, indefinite and subservient. Woolf instead favours the punctuation mark that most resembles where she wanted to be as a writer and as a woman, a mark like a sluice gate, one that is more open than the period but more in control than the comma, a feminist punctuation mark. Woolf famously wrote an essay called
A Room of One’s Own
, in which she describes the difficulties of being a female writer in a field dominated by men. Well, her prose is like that, full of thoughts that are related but wouldn’t fit in the oppressive big room of a single sentence;
they rather inhabit the many smaller rooms of a sentence punctuated by semi-colons.

I invite you to enter slowly, mindfully, taking your time, the many rooms of Virginia Woolf’s prose.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

V
IRGINIA
W
OOLF
(1882–1941) was a prolific British writer, publishing over five hundred essays and dozens of novels, short stories and non-fiction books.
A Room of One’s Own
, her most famous non-fiction composition, discusses the issue of women writing in a male-dominated society and why few women in her time were successful novelists. Other celebrated works include
To the Lighthouse, The Waves
and
Orlando
. She was married to the writer Leonard Woolf, and together they founded and operated the Hogarth Press, which published works by T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield and John Maynard Keynes, and introduced British readers to Sigmund Freud’s work on psychoanalysis. Woolf committed suicide when she was fifty-nine, most likely because of undiagnosed bipolar disorder.

Dear Mr. Harper,

This is an unusual book I am sending you, for a number of reasons. For starters, it’s fresh off the press. I bought it the day it was published. None of that pleasing, comforting wornness to it, like an old friend coming for a visit. Instead, a shiny, spine-cracking, new-smelling newness. And it’s a children’s book, not something I’d normally send to an adult.

What won me over to this book was its theme and the profession of its authors.
Read All About It
! is about the appeal and the importance of reading. Tyrone Brown, the protagonist, a student at Good Day Elementary School, is good at math, good at science, good at sports, but he doesn’t like reading. When Miss Libro brings the kids to the school library to read to them, Tyrone is soooooo bored. He’d rather daydream. But one day, when Miss Libro is reading from a book about an astronaut, he pays attention—and he’s taken in. Suddenly his world changes. It becomes populated by ghosts and dragons and historical
figures like Benjamin Franklin (this is an American book) and, most endearingly, by a pig. Tyrone comes to realize that books are a fantastic way to dream. I won’t tell you the rest of the story. You’ll have to read all about it yourself.

The authors, Laura Bush and Jenna Bush, a mother-daughter team, are teachers and, according to their bios on the backflap, “passionate about reading.”

A word about teachers. I love teachers. I always have. If I were not a writer, I’d be a teacher. I cannot think of a more important profession. It has always struck me as odd that lawyers and doctors should have such high standing—reflected not only in their salaries but in their social prominence—when, in the course of a normal, happy, healthy life, one should only exceptionally have to consult either. But teachers—we’ve all met and needed teachers. Teachers shaped us. They came into our dark minds and lit a light. They taught us both explicitly and by example. To teach is a magnificent verb, a social verb, implying someone else, whereas the verbs to earn, to buy, to want are lonely and hollow.

I could name so many of the teachers who marked my life. In fact, I will. Miss Preston and Mrs. Robinson were two of my early homeroom teachers. Mr. Grant taught me biology. Mr. Harvey taught me Latin. Mr. McNamara and Sister Reid taught me mathematics. Mr. Lawson and Mr. Davidson taught me English. Mr. Van Husen and Mr. Archer taught me history. The amazing Mr. Saunders taught me geography. And so on. Three decades have gone by, and still I remember these people. Where would I be without them, what frustrated, angry soul would I be? There is only so much parents can do to form us. After that, our fate lies with teachers.

And when we are no longer full-time students, there are all the informal teachers we meet as adults, the men, women and
children who know better and who show us how to do better, how to be better.

Pity, then, that we live in a society that so little values teachers and schools. We have, alas, Mr. Harper, fallen upon times in which the common thinking seems to be that societies should be run as if they were corporations, with profitability as the guiding imperative. In this corporatist view of society, those who do not generate dollars are deemed undesirable. So it is that rich societies become unkind to the poor. I see this mean attitude in my own beloved province of Saskatchewan, where the new government is waging, as I’ve heard it put, a “war on the poor,” and this, at a time of unprecedented prosperity [which is ongoing in Saskatchewan, despite the global economic crisis; we are a “have” province]. As if the poor will just disappear if ignored enough. As if there will be no broader consequence to the poor becoming poorer. As if the poor aren’t citizens too. As if some of the poor aren’t helpless children.

Well, in this race in which they are left behind, the poor are joined by students. Because investing in the education of a six-year-old, with a return that will be seen only in fifteen years or so, once that student has got a job and has started paying taxes, is not an investment worth making if one is looking to make quick money. And so we fund our schools minimally, burdening university students with levels of debt that neutralize their ability to be wealth-generating citizens. How can you buy a car, a house, appliances, how can you contribute to the economy, if you’re crushed by a massive debt? The corporatist agenda is thus defeated by its own ideology.

Teachers are at the forefront of resisting this negative trend. With whatever means they are given, until they burn out, as they too commonly do, they continue their effort to produce intelligent, knowledgeable, caring citizens. Teachers are pillars of society.

Most teachers are women, certainly at the elementary school level, just as most readers are women. Laura Bush and Jenna Bush, teachers and readers both, are in that way typical. One is left wondering: while wives and daughters are teaching and reading, what are husbands and fathers doing? In our society, does the left hand know what the right hand is doing?

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

L
AURA
B
USH
(b. 1946), wife of former president George W. Bush, taught elementary school and worked as a school librarian. She is a founder of the National Book Festival, and honorary chair of the Laura Bush Foundation for America’s Libraries. During her husband’s presidential terms, she was honoured by the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity and the American Library Association. Her daughter J
ENNA
H
AGER
(née Bush) (b. 1981) is also an elementary school teacher. In 2007, Jenna wrote
Ana’s Story: A Journey of Hope
, chronicling her experiences with UNICEF in South America.

Dear Mr. Harper,

The book that accompanies this letter was heartily recommended to me by a bookseller. I’d never heard of it or of its author. I thought to myself, Well, why not? An obscure book that moved at least one reader. That makes it as valid as a book that moved a million. A little later, I mentioned my choice to a friend and she said, “Oh, he just won the Pulitzer Prize two days ago.”

So much for the obscurity of Junot Díaz. I’m sending you
Drown
, his first book, a collection of short stories. It came out in 1996. It took Díaz eleven years to write his second book, the novel
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
, for which he won, just a month ago, the Pulitzer.

That’s one of the good things about literary prizes. They bring attention to books or authors that might otherwise be missed by readers. The life of the literary writer is mostly invisible, like the movement of lava under the surface of the earth. Poems, short stories and novels are published, they are reviewed
here and there, sales are modest, the world forgets, the writer writes on. It sounds dull, it’s generally financially impoverishing, but hidden from view is the intoxication of being creative, the wrestling with words, the heaven of good writing days, the hell of bad ones, with at the end of it the sense that one has proven King Lear wrong, that something
can
come of nothing. A book is a bottle with a genie inside it. Rub it, open it, and the genie will come out to enchant you. Imagine being the one who put the genie in the bottle. Yes, it’s terribly exciting work.