101 Letters to a Prime Minister (19 page)

Well, what does he want, does he want to be free and unfettered or a bustling capital?

The novel ends, with trumpeting triumphalism, as follows:

Just the kind of neighbour we all want, the loud, overbearing oaf with the poor, mousy wife who has the word EGO carved over his door.

That is the paradox and failure of Ayn Rand’s vision. Her response to the excesses of collectivism is an excessive and simplistic egoism. The more realistic challenge in life is to be oneself amidst others, to heed one’s own needs and at the same time satisfy the demands of one’s community. It is not easy. Life, and not only politics, is the art of compromise.

That push and pull between the needs of the individual and the needs of the collectivity is at the heart of an election. If every voter votes strictly according to self-interest, then the collectivity, the nation, will be riven by discord and divisions and will risk falling apart. But if the collective We is overfed, then its constituent elements are starved. Every politician, and you first and foremost, Mr. Harper, must balance personal interest with what is good for the nation. If you divide and conquer too much, if you heed too little, then the country will suffer, as will your reputation in history. Enlightened statesmanship is required by all, both voters and politicians. But that’s a risky sell, isn’t it, trying to peddle a better future to voters worried
about their immediate present? The best is demanded of all of us. I can only hope we will get it.

Since we have an election on our hands, let me make my personal appeal. Don’t worry, it won’t cost anything. I won’t bay about arts funding or the centrality of art in our lives or even, more cravenly, about the profitability of the arts industry in Canada (what was the sum I read recently, $47 billion in 2007 alone, more than the profits from the mining industry? Not that I buy that argument. The essential is inherently profitable, existentially. The individual who is artless is poor, no matter how much money he or she may have). No, I only want to give you for free an idea, the following:

What if a reading list were established for prospective prime ministers of Canada, to ensure that they have sufficient imaginative depth to be at the helm of our country? After all, we expect a prime minister to have a fair knowledge of the history and geography of Canada, to know something about economics and public administration, about current events and foreign affairs, the financial assets of a prime minister are accountable to us, so why shouldn’t his or her imaginative assets also be accountable?

Because that has been the whole point of our literary duet, hasn’t it? If you haven’t read, now or earlier, any of the books I have suggested, or books like them, if you haven’t read
The Death of Ivan Ilych
or any other Russian novel, if you haven’t read
Miss Julia
or any other Scandinavian play, if you haven’t read
Metamorphosis
or any other German-language novel, if you haven’t read
Waiting for Godot
or
To the Lighthouse
or any other experimental play or novel, if you haven’t read
Artists and Models
or any other erotica, if you haven’t read the
Meditations
of Marcus Aurelius or
The Educated Imagination
or any other philosophical inquiry, if you haven’t read
Under Milk Wood
or any other poetic prose, if you haven’t read
Their Eyes Were Watching God
or
Drown
or any other American novel, if you haven’t read
The Cellist of Sarajevo
or
The Island Means Minago
or
The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi
or any other Canadian novel, poem or play—then what is your mind made of? What materials went into the building of the dreams you have for our country? What is the colour, the pattern, the rhyme and reason of your imagination? These are not questions one is usually entitled to ask, but once someone has power over me, then, yes, I do have the right to probe your imagination, because your dreams may become my nightmares.

This Prime Minister’s Reading List could be administered by the Speaker of the House of Commons, an impartial figure, perhaps benefiting from recommendations not only from Members of Parliament but from all Canadian citizens. It would be a hard list to set up, that’s for sure. How to represent concisely all that the written word has done, here and abroad, in English and French and other languages? The Prime Minister’s Reading List couldn’t be too long; we wouldn’t want you sitting around reading novels your whole mandate. And it would be subject to regular updates, of course, to reflect changing times and tastes. How to implement the list would be another challenge. Would it be a yearly reading list, or just one at the beginning of each term? And how to check that you’ve actually read the books and not had an assistant summarize them for you? Would you have to write an exam, pen an essay, face a committee, answer questions during a Question Period exclusively devoted to the matter?

“I have no time for this nonsense,” you might feel like shouting. But as I said to you in my very first letter, there is a space next to every bed where a book can be lying in wait. And I ask you again: what is your mind made of?

So, would that be an idea, to set up a Prime Minister’s Reading List? What is your position on this vital issue?

I await your answer.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

A
YN
R
AND
(1905–1982) was a Russian-born American novelist, playwright and screenwriter. Her most famous novels are
The Fountainhead
and
Atlas Shrugged
. Within two weeks of arriving in Hollywood to launch her screenwriting career, Rand was hired as an extra and then a script reader for director Cecil B. DeMille, and met her future husband, the actor Frank O’Connor, to whom she would stay married for fifty years. She was also politically active. Her works prominently reflect a belief in individualism, capitalism and basic civil liberties, as well as her staunch opposition to collectivist political structures.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Campaigning must be gruelling, especially when you are head of a party. You work and travel constantly, you speak to people morning, noon and evening, you must always be on your guard, and all of it is very personal. The worst, I imagine, is the complete loss of privacy. Any time you might want for yourself must be sacrificed to the demands of public life.

An excellent way to climb back into yourself is to read a book. I suspect that reading is such a satisfying experience because it is at one and the same time a dialogue —between your mind and an external source of words—and an entirely
private experience. When you are reading, your guard needn’t be up. You can be entirely yourself. Even better: you are totally free. You can read slowly or quickly, you can reread a section or skip it, why, you can even throw the book down and pick up another—it’s all up to you. The freedom goes even further: what you experience while reading is also entirely your own affair. You can let yourself be engrossed by what you are reading, or you can let your mind wander. You can be a receptive reader, or, if you want, an obstreperous one. The freedom, I repeat, is total. When else do we have such a feeling? Is it not the case that in most every other activity, personal or social, we are hemmed in by rules and regulations, by the intrusions and expectations of others?

Reading is one of the best ways to bring on that essential condition for the thinking person, one that I mentioned at the start of our exchange: stillness. All the noise and confusion of the outer world falls away, is blocked off, when one is reading and one becomes still. Which is to say, one enters into dialogue with oneself, asking questions, coming up with replies, feeling and assessing facts and emotions. That is why reading is so fortifying, because in setting us free it allows us to re-centre ourselves, it allows the mind’s eye to look at itself in a mirror and take stock.

What better book to bear witness to this process than
Mister Pip
, by the New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones. Your mind will travel far with this novel. For starters, the story takes place on the Pacific island of Bougainville, part of Papua New Guinea. But it also takes place, in a way, in Victorian England. There’s a quieting appeal right there, isn’t there? Who hasn’t dreamed of spending time on an island in the Pacific, surrounded by blue sea and tropical greenery? And who doesn’t like visiting Europe?

Mister Pip
is a novel about a novel. The name Pip might be familiar to you. It’s the name of the main character in
Great
Expectations
, the novel by Charles Dickens. This is no coincidence.
Great Expectations
is a character in Jones’s novel, one might say. It is certainly the catalyst to much of the action in it.

On Bougainville, a white man, Mr. Watts, lives in a village of black people who accept him because he is married to one of them, Grace, who has gone crazy, but of whom Mr. Watts takes loving care. A rebellion shuts down the local mine and results in the evacuation of all the whites who work there. Only Mr. Watts stays on. He and the villagers are cut off from the rest of the world by a blockade. Mr. Watts agrees to become the schoolteacher. But he knows precious little. Chemistry is just a word, and history little more than a list of famous names. One thing he does know and love, though, is Charles Dickens’s great novel. He reads it to the children. They are enchanted. They fall in love with Pip. But their parents and even more so the government troops that routinely descend upon the village to terrorize its inhabitants are suspicious of this Mr. Pip. Where is he hiding? Produce him or else, they warn.

Lloyd Jones’s novel is about how literature can create a new world. It is about how the world can be read like a novel, and a novel like the world. If that sounds twee, be warned that there is also shocking meanness and violence in
Mister Pip
.

Does the violence make the fable-like element pale in comparison? Does “reality” come through and displace the “fiction”? Not at all. You will see. The novel argues that the imagination, whether religious or artistic, is what makes the world bearable.

I am also sending you
Great Expectations
. It’s not necessary to have read it to understand
Mister Pip
, but it is such an enjoyable masterpiece that I thought I’d throw it in as an extra pleasure.

I had the pleasure of meeting Lloyd Jones just last week at the Brisbane Literary Festival. He kindly agreed to autograph your copy of his novel.

May you enjoy both
Mister Pip
and
Great Expectations
. Better still: may they bring you stillness.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

L
LOYD
J
ONES
(b. 1955) is a New Zealander who has been publishing books since 1985. His experiences as a journalist and travel writer have imbued his novels with a strong sense of realism. His most recent novel,
Mister Pip
, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book in 2007. Other well-known works by Jones include
Biografi, Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance, Paint Your Wife
and
The Book of Fame
. Several of his novels have been successfully adapted for the stage. Jones has also written books for children, and edited an anthology of sports writing.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Meet Alex. He’s the nightmare of both citizens and governments, the first because they are afraid of him and the second because they don’t know what to do with him. Alex, you see, is a-lex, outside the law, from the Latin. He and his friends mug people, loot stores and invade homes, liberally dishing out extreme violence and routinely indulging in gang rape. And to think he’s only fifteen. When he’s caught, he rots in a juvenile home for a while until he’s let out—and then what? Well, why stop when you’re having such a good time? He gets back to the fun of “ultra-violence.” Welcome to the world of
A Clockwork Orange
, a brilliant short novel by the English writer Anthony Burgess (1917–1993), published in 1962.

“What’s it going to be then, eh?” That slightly bullying question appears at the beginning of each of the novel’s three sections. It is asked not only of one or another of the story’s characters; it is asked of us. What’s it going to be with Alex
then, eh? What are we to do with him?
A Clockwork Orange
, despite the great violence in it, in fact, because of it, is a morally preoccupied work.

When Alex is caught after his latest bout of thuggish mayhem, the authorities try a different approach. They try conditioning. If a dog can be conditioned to salivate upon hearing a bell tinkling, why can’t a boy be conditioned to reject violence? Alex is subjected to the Ludovico Method, in which he is given injections that make him feel deathly nauseous at the same time as he is being shown extremely violent films. He thus learns to become sickened by violence, literally. Unfortunately, because of the soundtrack of some of the reels he is forced to watch, Alex is also accidentally conditioned to feel revulsion upon hearing classical music. This aggrieves him greatly because our Alex, despite his brutal tendencies, is a music lover (sounds historically familiar, doesn’t it?).