What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Hey Jude,
From 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,

Christmas crept up on me unnoticed this winter. Suddenly it was December 25th and I realized that I had committed that common, life-eating error: I had stopped paying heed to the flow of time. This lapse was reflected in the last book I sent you. Though original and imaginative, Borges’s Fictions does not obviously fit with the original and imaginative books I sent you last Christmas (our second Christmas, speaking of the flow of time). Those, if you remember, were three children’s books: The Brothers Lionheart, Imagine a Day, and The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. They were suitably festive. Did you and your family enjoy them? Did they make you smile and laugh? This week I am sending you a book that I hope will genuinely please you, that you will unwrap, so to speak, and react to with surprise and delight. A real Christmas book, in other words.

I gather you are a Beatles fan. Here then is a selection of poems and lyrics by Paul McCartney. The songs he penned as a Beatle jumped out at me. I found it impossible to read “The Fool on the Hill” or “Eleanor Rigby” or “Lady Madonna” or “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” or “Lovely Rita” or “Rocky Raccoon” or “When I’m Sixty-Four”, among others, in the hushed, even voice of normal prose. Instead, I sang along in my head, pausing at the right moments for the band to play its part. I’m not very familiar with McCartney’s later career with the Wings or as a solo artist, so those songs lay more quietly on the page for me, as did the poems. I could generally tell the lyrics from the poems because the former had more repetitions and something seemed lacking in them to give them independent literary life. It was in looking in the index that I would see that they were, most often, the words from a Wings song.

A song’s lyrics, I realized, are inseparable from its melody. The melody supplies the lift, suspending one’s disbelief and cynicism or giving one permission to entertain the forbidden, while the lyrics supply the in, inviting one to compare one’s experience of life with what is being said in the song, or, even better, inviting one to sing along. The possibility of listening intelligibly and of singing along are essential to a song’s appeal, because both involve the direct, personal participation of the listener. This participation, the extent to which one can mesh one’s life and dreams with a song, explains why something so short—most of the Beatles’ early songs are less than two minutes long—can go so deep so quickly. That’s the beguiling illusion of a great song: it speaks to each of us individually, and with a magnetic voice, and so we listen intently, instantly drawn into an inner dream world. Who hasn’t been moved to the core by a song, eyes closed and body shuddering with emotion? In that state, we address feelings we might be too shy to deal with in plain speech—raw, hungering lust, for example—or ones that cut deep but are so mundane we are embarrassed to talk about them: loneliness, yearning, heartbreak.

A good song is a hard trick to pull off. Classical musicians scoff at the crudeness of pop melodies, while more literary poets roll their eyes at the banality of pop lyrics, but there is a measure of envy in this resentment. What violinist or poet would not want a stadium full of rapt listeners? At any rate, Paul McCartney, with appealing lyrics and mesmerizing melodies, within the amazing creative synergy that was the Beatles, magisterially assisted by producer George Martin, pulled off that trick so well that every generation since the mid-sixties has fallen in love with his songs. But you already know that.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed hard cover book

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