What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Words take you places.
Best wishes,
Lloyd Jones
September 21
Brisbane, Australia

Sent to you by
a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

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

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 school teacher. 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

encl: two inscribed paperbacks

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