101 Letters to a Prime Minister (5 page)

One of the great qualities of Agatha Christie (funny how she’s never referred to simply as “Christie”) is that ambition and talent were perfectly matched. In over eighty novels, she delivered exactly what she promised. To do that in literature requires, I think, not only talent and a sound knowledge of one’s form but also a good degree of self-knowledge. The result, besides a trail of bodies, is an artistic integrity that has endeared her to generations of readers.

On page 38 I have highlighted a line on George Eliot that I liked: “That pen that George Eliot wrote
The Mill on the Floss
with—that sort of thing—well, it’s only just a pen after all. If you’re really keen on George Eliot, why not get
The Mill on the Floss
in a cheap edition and read it?”

You might have noticed that I have been sending you used books. I have done this not to save money, but to make a point, which is that a used book, unlike a used car, hasn’t lost any of its initial value. A good story rolls off the lot into the hands of its new reader as smoothly as the day it was written.

And there’s another reason for these used paperbacks that never cost much even when new: I like the idea of holding a book that someone else has held, of eyes running over lines that have already seen the light of other eyes. That, in one image, is the community of readers, is the communion of literature.

I was in Ottawa recently and while I was there I happened to visit Laurier House, where two of your most illustrious predecessors lived and worked: Wilfrid Laurier and William Lyon Mackenzie King. It’s an impressive mansion, with dark panelling, rich carpets, imposing furniture and a hidden elevator. What a perfect setting for an Agatha Christie murder mystery, I thought, which accounts for the book now in your hands.

Did you know that both Laurier and King were voracious readers? I include photographs I took of King’s library, which was also where he worked, getting Canada through the Depression and the Second World War and building the foundations of our enviable social welfare system. Remarkable the range and number of books he read, including one that I love, one of the greatest books ever written, Dante’s
Divine Comedy
. There was the complete Kipling, too, and all of Shakespeare. A two-volume biography of Louis Pasteur. Books on art. Shelf after shelf of the most varied histories and biographies. There were even what looked like self-help books to do with body and health. Truly a striking library. And let’s not forget the piano.

Laurier, who made a country out of an independent colony, was an even more dedicated reader. His library was so extensive that King had it shipped out when he moved in, needing space for his own collection. Laurier’s books are now stored at the National Archives.

A part of King’s library
.

How did they manage to read so much? Perhaps Laurier and King were excellent at time management. Certainly television wasn’t there to inform them in part and otherwise fruitlessly devour their hours. Or was it that reading was a natural and essential element of being a respectable, well-rounded gentleman? Was it some ingrained habit of the privileged that gave these two prime ministers permission to spend so much time reading?

Reading was perhaps a privileged activity then. But not now. In a wealthy, egalitarian country like ours, where the literacy rate is high (although some people still struggle and need our help) and public libraries are just that, public, reading is no longer an elite pastime. A good book today has no class, so to speak, and it can be had by anyone. One of the marvels of where I live, the beautiful province of Saskatchewan, is that the smallest town—Hazlet, for example, population 126—has a public library. Nor need books be expensive, if you want to own one. You can get a gold mine of a used book for fifty cents. After that, all that is needed to appreciate the investment is a little pocket of time.

And King was a musician, too
.

I bet you King hurried to bed muttering to himself, “It was Parker the butler, I’m sure of it!”

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

D
AME
A
GATHA
C
HRISTIE
1890–1977, the award-winning British author referred to by some as “the Queen of Crime,” is one of the bestselling authors of all time. She is known the world over for her detective novels and created two of the most iconic detectives in crime-writing history: Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple. She worked as a nurse in World War I, acquiring a knowledge of poisons and illnesses that would later serve her well when writing murder mysteries. In addition to writing more than eighty novels, she wrote several plays, short stories and romances. Many of her stories have been adapted for the screen.

Dear Mr. Harper,

And now a book to be read aloud. I believe that’s the best way to read Elizabeth Smart’s
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
. Because this is a language book, a book where language is the plot, the character and the setting. There is something else, of course, the theme, and the theme here is an old eternal one: love.

So what a perfect book to read in bed at the end of the day and aloud. A book to be shared.

The links between art and life can be reductionist, but this might help you stay afloat in the wash of language: one day Elizabeth Smart read some poems in a bookshop and she fell in love—I’m tempted to say “decided to fall in love”—with the poet, who was George Barker. Good thing for George Barker, because I suspect George Barker will be remembered by posterity more for being “the poet Elizabeth Smart fell in love with” than for his poetry. Smart and George Barker eventually met, in California, and they became lovers and her essential
bliss and hell began. Because George Barker was married and would have durable relations with more women than just his wife and Elizabeth Smart. The great number of children he fathered—fifteen in all, including four with Smart—might indicate that he took the consequences of love as seriously as its emotional premise, but I doubt his fathering skills were that good. I am digressing. Elizabeth Smart fell in love with George Barker, it was killing for her heart but it yielded this jewel of a book. In a way, Smart was another Dante and
By Grand Central Station
is another
Divine Comedy
, only the direction of travel is opposite: she started in heaven and made her way to hell.

So, layers of allegorical allusions and metaphorical flights, but at the core of this book is the hard diamond of a passionate love affair.

I’ll leave the love affair to your own thoughts and conclusions. What can more easily be talked about is the beauty of the language. Language is the crudest form of metaphor. It is a system of refined grunts in which, by common agreement, a sound we make—say “spinach”—is agreed to represent, to mean, that green leafy thing over there that’s good to eat. It makes communicating so much easier and effective, spares one constantly having to point at with bug eyes. I can just see a group of cave people fiercely bobbing their heads up and down and grunting and shouting for joy when they first came upon the idea. It was such a good idea that it spread quickly. What a thrill, involving a fair number of bruising fights, I imagine, it must have been to be the ones who were the first to look upon the world and map it over with words. Different groups of people agreed on different grunts, and that’s all right.
Vive la différence
.

And so we have: spinach, épinards, espinacas, spinaci, espinafre, spinat, spenat, pinaatti, szpinak, spenót,
,
, and we are the better for it. Because these utilitarian
grunts unexpectedly became a world unto themselves, offering their own possibilities. We thought language would be a simple tool directly relaying the world to us. But, lo, we found that the tool has become its own world, still relaying the outer world but in a mediated way. Now there is the word and there is the world and the two are enthralled with each other, like two lovers.

The lovers in the novel were arrested for trying to cross a state border—illicit love being a customs offence at the time—and the first pages of Part Four beautifully capture the coarseness with which the world sometimes greets love.

I thought I’d quote some passages to show you what powerful stuff you have between your hands, but there are too many—I might as well quote the whole book—and to take them out of context somehow seems offensive.

You remember how I recommended Gerasim to you, from
The Death of Ivan Ilych
. Well, in this book, we have Gerasim’s equally domestic but petty antithesis: Mr. Wurtle.

Beware of Mr. Wurtle, Mr. Harper.

I can’t resist quoting. On page 30:

On page 44:

Grandly romantic? Yes. Highly impractical? Absolutely. But as she asks one of the police officers who arrests her, on page 55:

She might as well have been Jesus, and the officer surely wished later that he had been more like the humble Roman centurion of Capernaum.

There is this paragraph, on page 65, after she has returned to her native Ottawa, banished there for her extraconjugal illegality: