What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
P.S. Happy birthday

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON  K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Now that your Flames have been knocked out of the playoffs I guess you’ll have more free time on your hands.

I fear that some may criticize me for the second book I am sending you, Animal Farm, by George Orwell. It’s so well known, and it’s another book by a dead white male. But there is time yet to be representative of all those who have harnessed the word to express themselves—believe me, they are varied and legion—unless you lose the next election, which would likely give you even more time to read, but not, alas, according to my suggestions.

Many of us read Animal Farm when we were young, perhaps you did too, and we loved it because of the animals and the wit. But it’s in our more mature years that its import can better be understood.

Animal Farm has some commonalities with The Death of Ivan Ilych: both are short, both show the reality-changing power of great literature, and both deal with folly and illusion. But whereas Ivan Ilych deals with individual folly, the failure of one individual to lead an authentic life, Animal Farm is about collective folly. It is a political book, which won’t be lost on someone in your line of business. It deals with one of the few matters on which we can all agree: the evil of tyranny. Of course a book cannot be reduced to its theme. It’s in the reading that a book is great, not in what it seeks to discuss.

But I also have a personal reason for why I’ve chosen Animal Farm: I aspire to write a similar kind of book.

Animal Farm first. You will notice right away the novel’s limpid and unaffected style, Orwell’s hallmark. You get the impression the words just fell onto the page, as if it were the easiest, the most natural thing in the world to write such sentences and paragraphs and pages. It’s not. To think clearly and to express oneself clearly are both hard work. But I’m sure you know that from working on speeches and papers.

The story is simple. The animals of Manor Farm have had enough of Farmer Jones and his exploitative ways so they rebel, throw him out, and set up a commune run according to the highest and most egalitarian principles. But there’s a rotten pig named Napoleon and another one named Squealer—a good talker he—and they are the nightmare that will wreck the dream of Animal Farm, as the farm is renamed, despite the best efforts of brave Snowball, another pig, and the meek goodness of most of the farm animals.

I’ve always found the end of Chapter II very moving. There’s the question of five pails of milk from the cows. What to do with them, now that Farmer Jones is gone and the milk won’t be sold? Mix it with the mash they all eat, hints a chicken. “Never mind the milk, comrades!” cries Napoleon. “The harvest is more important. Comrade Snowball will lead the way. I shall follow in a few minutes.” And so off the animals go, to bring in the harvest. And the milk? Well, “…in the evening it was noticed that the milk had disappeared.”

With those five pails of white milk the ideal of Animal Farm, still so young, begins to die, because of Napoleon’s corrupted heart. Things only get worse, as you will see.

Animal Farm is a perfect exemplar of one of the things that literature can be: portable history. A reader who knows nothing about 20th-century history? Who has never heard of Joseph Stalin or Leon Trotsky or the October Revolution? Not a problem: Animal Farm will convey to that reader the essence of what happened to our neighbours across the Arctic. The perversion of an ideal, the corruption of power, the abuse of language, the wreckage of a nation—it’s all there, in a scant 120 pages. And having read those pages, the reader is made wise of the ways of the politically wicked. That too is what literature can be: an inoculation.

And now the personal reason for why I’ve sent you Animal Farm: the Jewish people of Europe murdered at the hands of the Nazis also need to have their history made portable. And that is what I’m trying to do with my next book. But to take the rubble of history—so many tears, so much bloodshed—and distil it into some few elegant pages, to turn horror into something light—it’s no easy feat.

I offer you, then, a literary ideal of mine, besides a great read.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S. Happy birthday.

encl: one inscribed paperback book

Reply:

Pending…