101 Letters to a Prime Minister (30 page)

Is that such a bad thing? I don’t think so. So read
The Virgin Secretary’s Impossible Boss
, and glimpse the dream world of billions of people.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

C
AROLE
M
ORTIMER
(b. 1960) is a romance novelist. She has written more than 150 books, and lives in England with her husband and six children.

Dear Mr. Harper,

It’s not my habit to quote myself, but to introduce the novel
The Tartar Steppe
, by the Italian writer Dino Buzzati (1906–1972), I will:

You’ll find these words on the back cover of the edition I’m sending you. The blurb is one way in which a writer can be a citizen of the arts. When giving a blurb, a writer lends his or her éclat to a book, so that the reader is guided not only by what the writer says, but by the esteem in which that writer is held by
the reader. I’ve been the beneficiary of a good blurb: Margaret Atwood kindly read and liked my novel
Life of Pi
and her supportive words likely attracted the attention of a good number of readers. Sometimes the blurb will be by a journalist and its weight will depend on the prestige of the newspaper in which the journalist’s review appeared. This system of commendation can be very effective in helping a book meet its readers, and publishers use it all the time. When you finish your book on hockey, your publisher will dream of getting Wayne Gretzky to read it and commend it. “If the Great One liked this book, I’m sure I will too,” every hockey fan will say, grabbing the book off the shelf.

For this British edition of
The Tartar Steppe
, the blurb system is in full operation. On the front cover, the
Sunday Times
(“A masterpiece”) and J. M. Coetzee (“A strange and haunting novel, an eccentric classic”) exhort the reader to pay attention, while on the back cover Alberto Manguel, Jorge Luis Borges and I, in a few more words, explain to a prospective reader why this book must be read.

And really, it
must
be read.
The Tartar Steppe
, published in 1940, is indeed a masterpiece, insufficiently known to the reading public. It tells the story of a young officer who is posted to a remote fort on the edges of an unnamed country. And there he waits for an invasion of barbarians that never comes. He waits for thirty years, he waits his entire life away, arriving at the fort as a young man full of prospects and leaving it old and broken. Waiting—and with it the dread of expectation—is a very twentieth-century concern. If Samuel Beckett had been writing a century earlier, he would have written
Acting for Godot
. But because it was the twentieth century that paid the price for the nineteenth’s actions for God and for country—all the mess of colonialism and greedy empire-building—Beckett
wrote
Waiting for Godot
. Invoking the play (which I sent you a while ago, remember?) is not inappropriate.
The Tartar Steppe
and
Waiting for Godot
were written within ten years of each other, the novel in the late 1930s, the play in the late 1940s, and they speak of the same concern. But in the ten years between the two compositions, the century shifted from the modern to the postmodern, from acting to waiting, from hoping to dreading, and that shift is reflected in the two works.
The Tartar Steppe
lies at the end of a traditional aesthetic sensibility that had run its course.
Godot
is the irreverent next step, steeped in caustic humour and bleakness and far more self-conscious.

The Tartar Steppe
is a sober and luminous work. The luminosity is literal: the fort is set amidst high mountains and is bathed in pure light and thin air. But the story also achieves a philosophical brightness as it follows one man’s endless waiting in a setting that is stripped of all excessive adornments—it’s a military fort, after all. If you want a sense of the feel of the work, imagine a room in a modern art museum that is large and flooded with natural light and that features a single, large painting, a Rothko. You see what I mean? The novel is bleak, but beautifully bleak. I’ve often thought of Dino Buzzati as a cheerier, warmer Franz Kafka.

See what you think. Explore Fort Bastiani with Giovanni Drogo. Fall into the routine of a military life. Try to make the grade. Most important: keep your eyes open for the enemy!

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S. I forgot to mention:
The Tartar Steppe
was one of the favourite novels of François Mitterrand. What a splendid blurb that would be, from the president of France
.

D
INO
B
UZZATI
(1906–1972) was an Italian novelist, journalist, playwright, short story writer, poet and painter. He worked as a journalist in Africa in World War II, and remained at the Milanese newspaper
Corriere della Sera
for the duration of his career.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Here is a book that I hope you’ve already read. There’s safety in being published in book form. Who knows what might happen to the letters I sent you? I print an extra copy of each before mailing it to you, and the originals are, I hope, gathering in an archive box, but these physical traces are subject to the erosion of time or might simply be lost. As for the website that bears public witness to our book club, despite the easy access anyone has to it on a computer, it too is ephemeral. Though a website may appear on a limitless number of screens at the same moment, its underlying support is far more limited: just a virtual memory somewhere that, despite all the safeguards and backups, could be compromised and its contents destroyed. More simply, a website needs to be maintained, the subscription kept up, and so on. After you leave office, I’m not sure there will be a reason to keep
www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca
going.

Hence the satisfaction in seeing the letters—or at least the first fifty-five in the English Canada edition (sixty in the Quebec edition)—published as a book. Books last. They last first of all because they are cleverly constructed. I’m stating the obvious here, but a book’s cover serves not only as decoration, allowing its contents to be visually represented, but as protection. If you remember the edition of Flannery O’Connor’s
Everything That Rises Must Converge
that I sent you, the thirty-sixth book, it was over forty years old, and that was a run-of-the-mill paperback with the thinnest of covers. Imagine the durability of a proper hardcover book. Such books can last for hundreds and even thousands of years. But books last for another reason. Words are oral artifacts, originally travelling from the mouths of speakers into the ears of listeners, vanishing upon being heard like waves crashing upon a coastline. The amazing, civilization-making cleverness of books is that they preserve, like a refrigerator, the freshness of words so that they can burst unspoken from the minds of writers into the minds of readers through the medium of sight. But the value of a book still remains in what it says, not in what it is. Of course, some books are valued for their own sake: Gutenberg Bibles, for example, of which fewer than fifty copies exist. But most books are merely messengers, conveying a message to whoever wants to look and read. Since millions of people love to read, millions of books are produced. So
What Is Stephen Harper Reading?
, the book version, will last because it will find protection in all the homes and libraries that shelter it.

I won’t say anything about the book except the following: though your name appears in it over and over, in the title, in the inscription, in the first line of each letter, the main subject is not actually you but the books I discuss.
What Is Stephen Harper Reading?
, is a book about books. Eventually, there will
be a complete edition. How many letters that book will contain, when it comes out, depends on you.

During a radio interview I did a few days ago in Montreal while promoting our book, the host mentioned that the Quebec journalist Chantal Hébert had sent you a book called
Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values
, by the economist Brian Lee Crowley, and that you had written back to her, thanking her for the book and saying “… and I have read it”! Well, I don’t have to ask what she has that I don’t. I know the answer: I haven’t sent you a single book on economic or political theory, or, for that matter, much non-fiction of any sort. Good of you to have read
Fearful Symmetry
. I’m not familiar with it. I hope you liked it. But is there any space on your reading list for a novel, a play, a poem? Last week you sang poetry to the Canadian people. No one expected “With a Little Help from My Friends” from you. And look at the effect you had. People were amazed. You made the front page of newspaper after newspaper, and often with a big photo of you at the piano. It goes to show how art can amaze, connect and unify.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

Dear Mr. Harper,

A few letters ago—number 64, to be precise, concerning Carole Mortimer’s novel
The Virgin Secretary’s Impossible Boss—
I mentioned in passing that J. M. Coetzee is my favourite living writer. Then in the next letter, in my discussion of blurbs, his name came up again, since a commendation of his graces Buzzati’s
The Tartar Steppe
. Natural, then, to send you a novel by this superlative writer. John Maxwell Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940 (he’s now an Australian citizen). He’s been showered with honours, notably two Booker Prizes and the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, and with good reason: he’s an artist of the highest order, characterized by a style that is spare yet highly evocative and novels that are finely crafted, morally engaged and hypnotically compelling. To show him off to you, I’ve selected his third novel,
Waiting for the Barbarians
, published in 1980. The nameless Magistrate who is the story’s protagonist lives in a frontier town on the edges of an equally
nameless Empire. Some unbarbaric barbarians—they’re mostly just peaceable nomads and fisherfolk who regularly barter with the townspeople—live just beyond. Relations between the barbarians and the citizens of the town are fine. Life is good and quiet. But then Colonel Joll, from the Third Bureau, arrives and informs the Magistrate that the barbarians are restless and a massive attack by them is imminent. It must be pre-empted. Two barbarians have recently been captured—a boy who is ill and his elderly uncle—for allegedly stealing cattle. They are promptly tortured
—tortured
—under Joll’s supervision, and the uncle dies as a result. The boy is kept alive only so that he can guide Joll and his acolytes into the desert to capture more barbarians, who are brought back to the town where they too are tortured. Eventually Joll returns to the capital to make his report. The Magistrate comes upon a barbarian girl begging in the streets. Her ankles have been broken, her eyesight partially ruined, her father tortured and killed before her, and now she has been left behind after her fellow prisoners were released. He takes her in. But the Magistrate’s descent into moral (and physical) hell has just begun, because Colonel Joll returns, with a battalion of fresh troops …

I leave it to you to discover what happens next. But is there not something about this set-up that sounds familiar? The frontier town, the barbarians, the waiting for their expected invasion—that’s right: it’s very much like the premise of
The Tartar Steppe
. No coincidence there. Coetzee drew inspiration from Buzzati’s novel, hence his words of praise for the Italian novel: “A strange and haunting novel, an eccentric classic.” Of course, the novels are very different. Whereas
The Tartar Steppe
is a philosophical novel bathed in sunlight, silence and solitude,
Waiting for the Barbarians
is a social work, rooted in the body and crowded with people, politics and pain. Coetzee may have
started his creative journey with Buzzati, but his destination is very much his own.

Which leads us to the topic of where writers get their ideas. Like Coetzee, I too have been inspired by books. My novel
Life of Pi
, for example, was partly inspired by a review I read of the novella
Max and the Cats
, by the Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar. And then other books, on religion, on animal behaviour in the wild and in captivity, on survival at sea, gave me further ideas and the facts from which I could weave my story. It is also true that an important source of inspiration for a writer is his or her life—but there’s something grander afoot in fiction than mere autobiography, even with a writer whose life is so interesting a simple accounting of it reads like a novel. Fiction, art in general, is the forum of all possibilities, the agora where ideas of every kind assemble. And so the essential need for the thinking person to dip into art regularly, because in art life is discussed and displayed in all its manifestations, from the most conventional to the most heinous to the most idealistic. Contemplating this vast display not only of what life should be, but of what life is, plants the seed of wisdom. To shun art, then, is to shun living beyond the narrow confines of one’s own experience. By contrast, to plunge into art is to live multiple lives. Art is a microscope or a telescope, either way making other realities, other worlds, other choices brighter, clearer, closer to us. Art the pregnant dream from which realities are born.