What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Can 130 million people be wrong?
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,

Since I was speaking about it last week, I thought I would send you an example of genre fiction, and what genre fiction has a more recognizable brand name than a Harlequin romance? A word about Harlequin. Their website informs me that they are a Canadian enterprise that publishes “over 120 titles a month in 29 languages in 107 international markets on six continents.” In 2007, Harlequin sold 130 million books. Since its founding, the company has sold a staggering, an unbelievable, 5.63 billion books. Those italics are Harlequin’s: they are clearly proud of their success, and so they should be. To have retailed as many books nearly as there are people on this planet is a unique achievement in publishing. You will get a hint of Harlequin’s depth of success when you look at the title page of the novel I’m sending you this week. Publishers usually mention where they have offices. To take a random example from my bookshelf, the hard cover edition I have of the novel Slow Man, by the Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, my favourite living writer, is the British edition, and it was published by Secker & Warburg. The title page informs me where they have offices: London. That’s it. The publishers of Carole Mortimer’s The Virgin Secretary’s Impossible Boss, on the other hand, append a small atlas of cities: Toronto, New York, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Sydney, Hamburg, Stockholm, Athens, Tokyo, Milan, Madrid, Prague, Warsaw, Budapest and Auckland. And their website informs me that this list is not up to date: Harlequin also has offices in Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro and even in a place called Granges-Paccot (I looked it up: it’s in Switzerland).

Now, can that many people be wrong? What’s the appeal of The Virgin Secretary’s Impossible Boss? 

Well, it’s not the writing. Take these three lines:

‘Lucky, lucky me,’ he drawled dryly.
‘You’re impossible,’ Andi told him impatiently.
He shrugged unrepentantly. ‘So I’m told.’

Oh, those adverbs. They clutter the prose like too many traffic lights on a road. But they make for easy, unthreatening prose, for prose that relieves the reader of having to think very hard. Elegance may be lost, but a clarity of sorts is gained. Faults can be found in other aspects of the writing too, as they can be found in the characterization and in the plot. And yet there are those numbers. 130 million. 5.63 billion.

I think the appeal of a Harlequin romance lies precisely in those traffic lights. A street with traffic lights is a safe street, a street in which the movement of vehicles is carefully regulated so that everyone can get home safe and sound. There’s something to be said for that kind of security. We don’t always want to be driving down adventurous roads that cross swamps, deserts and mountains.

The Virgin Secretary’s Impossible Boss is the story of Linus Harrison, a handsome, muscular, driven multi-millionaire, and his beautiful, independent personal assistant, Andrea Buttonfield. There are obstacles in their way—including a snow storm in Scotland that would chill the hardiest Yukoner that strands Linus and Andi in a pub where there’s only one room with one bed available to them—but they will find perfect love. Reading the book, I was reminded of Indian cinema. The usual fare from Bollywood is equally silly, unrealistic and escapist, yet that is exactly what the average Indian viewer wants, an escape from the harsh realities of life into a glamorous world populated by rich, beautiful people where a happy ending is guaranteed. The function of genre fiction is to relax and confirm, not to stress and challenge. Genre fiction seeks to deliver one thing: emotional satisfaction.

Is that such a bad thing? I don’t think so. So read The Virgin Secretary’s Impossible Boss and glimpse at the dream world of millions of people.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

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