What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Good luck with your Mr. Hyde,
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,

A story can sometimes capture in an image what might otherwise float around unexpressed. You must have had that experience yourself, in which a book or article or movie said cogently what you had been thinking in a vaguer way. A perfect example of a story that brings this sort of clarity is Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. First published in 1886, it was an instant success, read by everyone who read (including Queen Victoria and Prime Minister Gladstone), and it has become an enduring classic. The moral categories of good and evil have been known since the beginning of time, and each one of us comes to know them formally as a result of instruction by our parents and our teachers and intimately as a result of direct experience. But I suspect the way that most of us live with good and evil is that we claim to have given the keys to the house to good while we swear to have long ago thrown evil out. In other words, we think of ourselves as good, not perfect perhaps, but good enough, certainly better than our neighbours, and we use whatever rationalizations are necessary to maintain this self-image, while evil we consider as something essentially external. Other people are evil: criminals, bad cops, corrupt politicians, loitering youths, and so on. We find plenty of evil in the world, just not in ourselves.

The brilliance of Stevenson’s tale is in the way he portrays the forces of good and evil: he incarnates them as two full-blooded characters in the body of one duplicitous person. Because as I’m sure you know, even if you’ve never read the short novel before, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are not two people but one. Each is an embodiment of one of the moral extremes battling within the same person, different not only in character but in appearance. Tall, handsome Dr. Jekyll, of impeccable reputation, is the good incarnation of this tortured person, while the shrunken, heartless Mr. Hyde, of unremitting ill-repute, is the evil incarnation. But they are in dialogue. That’s the genius of the tale. Living within the same soul, the two are aware of each other and in ceaseless conflict. And we know which one is destined to win. If Dr. Jekyll won, if good went on being good, that would be matter for an inspiring sermon, but not for a ripping yarn. We need Mr. Hyde to win the day—but only briefly, don’t worry—to feel the frisson that is horror fiction’s specialty.

The novel is told in ten chapters. The first eight are effective but conventional. Strange, terrible events take place, the telling is partial and puzzling, suspense keeps us reading—it has all the trappings of a fine Gothic horror story. Then, in chapter nine, we learn from a minor character, a fellow doctor friend of Dr. Jekyll’s, that the evil Mr. Hyde, a brute and a murderer, is none other than a transmogrified Dr. Jekyll. That would have been a stunning revelation to a reader who knew nothing beforehand of the story. But the reason The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde rises above the standard horror story is to be found in chapter ten, the last and longest, told in the racked voice of Dr. Jekyll himself. In that chapter lies the greatness of the novel. To speak of good and evil as they usually are, with a smile of self-satisfaction and a censorious finger pointing out, is tiresome. None of that here. In the chapter “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case”, we have a man openly acknowledging and discussing his evil side and what he seeks to do with it. His idea is to give body to his evil side so that the good one might be more purely good, untroubled by the siren call of evil. Mr. Hyde is created then to make Dr. Jekyll better. But oh, the temptation of evil! Dr. Jekyll looks on in fascinated horror at the outrages his alter-ego commits. Slowly the fascination consumes him. While at first he alchemically switches back to Dr. Jekyll with ease, in time the efficacy of the potion that allows to do so wears out. The dominant Dr. Jekyll begins to lose ground to Mr. Hyde until the natural being of the man is as Mr. Hyde. To have this battle told from the inside, in the very voice of the tortured double combatant, is gripping reading, one that magnifies to an appalling degree the struggles each one of us, if we are morally lucid, must go through. This is the reason for the ongoing appeal of the story. We are all Dr. Jekylls and the moral question put to each of us is the same: what will you do with the Mr. Hyde lurking in you?

By my reading of the original tale, the evil that torments Jekyll is quite clearly a sexual one, the Victorian repression of a homosexual urge. See what you think, if you see the hints pointing at the same conclusion. But the tale, like any great story, can be read in a way that mirrors each reader’s personality. You, a politician, for example, must feel every day the inner tensions between the public good you desire to bring about and the evil that you must commit to do so. To have those opposite options clothed in the vivid, contrasting frames of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde should help you in your struggle to be a Prime Minister Jekyll.

A last observation: rarely has a story been so well served by its title. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—the words roll off the tongue with such ease, the counterpoint of the titles Dr and Mr pleasing and the names highly unusual and yet easy to remember. Curiously, the reader is never given an explanation as to how Mr. Hyde gets his name. Dr. Jekyll takes his potion in his laboratory, turns into another being, steps in front of a mirror, and “I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.” Clearly, Stevenson knew the names worked. Medicine is held to be a profession that does good, yet the second syllable of the good doctor’s name rhymes with “kill”. As for Mr. Hyde, he is what Jekyll wants to “hide”. It all works so well that anyone who has read the story remembers it fully just by recalling the title.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

P.S. I have received yet another reply from S. Russell, your executive correspondence officer, this time for the gift of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. [See the Reply section for Book Number 51.] That’s two letters in short order, after a silence of two years. I can see why in the case of Julius Caesar. In the letter that accompanied the play, I spoke about my concerns over new guidelines for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canadian Periodical Fund. That’s political stuff, the very fodder of a correspondence officer in a prime minister’s office. But a response to my gift of Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and Chester Brown’s Louis Riel came as a surprise. But I guess anything to do with Riel is political, still, and merits a response from you, however indirect. I wonder if I might receive a reply from you directly one day. There’s quite a choice of books you can write to me about, that’s for sure.

Reply:

Pending…