What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
An Obama pick,
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,

Well, with a budget like that, you might as well be a socialist. Remarkable how much your government has vowed to spend. Your days as a radical Reformer, determined to shrink the government like a wool sweater in a hot water wash, must be from a former life. I wonder what your friends at the National Citizens Coalition think? (Why is there no apostrophe in the name of that organization? I checked their website and that’s how they spell it. Are they so committed to free enterprise and fearful of social commitment that they won’t put the Citizens in the possessive case?)

I gather Michael Ignatieff was amused to hear echoes of his own statements in the recent Speech from the Throne (I enclose a Globe and Mail article). Don’t worry, you’re not the only one echoing him. President Obama (I do like the ring of that), in explaining why he was closing down the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay and the CIA’s secret overseas prisons and repealing other dubious counterterrorism measures taken by George W. Bush, used words that could have been Mr. Ignatieff’s. How our liberal democratic ideals must be reflected in our actions, how we cannot lightly sacrifice rights for the sake of excessive security expediency, how we will triumph over our enemies by keeping faith with our ideals, not by abandoning them, and so on—it’s all entirely in the spirit of the 47th book in our library, The Lesser Evil. Clearly Mr. Ignatieff’s views are shared by many, influenced by and feeding into a current of thought that is now becoming widely accepted, so you do well to open yourself to it.

Speaking of President Obama, it’s because of him that I’m sending you the novel Gilead, by the American writer Marilynne Robinson. It’s one of his favourite novels. I discovered this fact in an article in the New York Times, which I also include in this letter. It turns out Barack Obama is a reader, a big reader. And the books he has read and cherished have not only been practical texts that someone interested in governance would likely favour. No, he also likes poetry, fiction, philosophy: the Bible, Shakespeare’s tragedies, Melville, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, the poets Elizabeth Alexander and Derek Walcott, the philosophers Reinhold Niebuhr and St. Augustine, and many more. They’ve formed his oratory, his thinking, his very being. He’s a man-built-by-words and he has impressed the whole world.

I would sincerely recommend that you read Gilead before you meet President Obama on February 19th. For two people who are meeting for the first time, there’s nothing like talking about a book that both have read to create common ground and a sense of intimacy, of knowing the other in a small but important way. After all, to like the same book implies a similar emotional response to it, a shared recognition of the world reflected in it. This is assuming, of course, that you like the book.

That shouldn’t be too hard. There is much to like in Gilead. It’s a slow, honest novel, suffused with wonder and amazement (those two words come up often in the book), and surprisingly religious, practically devotional. There are no chapters, just entries divided by a blank line, as if it were a diary. The narration is leisurely and episodic, giving the impression of a ramble, but it’s actually a carefully constructed novel, building in power as it goes along. There is no facile irony, no seeking to please by the easy recourse of humour. Instead, the tone is sober, gentle, intelligent. The story is told by John Ames, an aged preacher who is ill with a heart condition that will kill him soon enough. He has a seven-year-old son come to him late in life as a result of an autumnal marriage to a much younger, much loved woman. He wants his son to know something of his father, and of his father’s father, and of his father’s father’s father—all of them named John Ames and all of them preachers—so he writes a long letter for his son to read when he is of age. The style is on the surface effortless, a plain, poetic speech with much about God and God’s people and the meaning of it all, with a few references to baseball. Very American, then, a novel one could imagine Ralph Waldo Emerson having written if Emerson had written fiction. Gilead is a graceful work, suffused with grace, and it has the luminous feel of the profound. It’s a novel that aspires to be a church, quiet, sparely furnished, whitely lit, filled with Presence and steeped in the essential. If there’s a novel that should give you a sense of stillness, it is this one.

I hope you like it. And if you don’t, remember nonetheless that it is one of keys that will let you into the mind of the current President of the United States.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback and two printouts of newspaper articles

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