What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A cautionary tale,
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 few letters ago—in the 64th, to be precise, concerning Carole Mortimer’s novel The Virgin Secretary’s Impossible Boss—I mentioned in passing that J.M. Coetzee was my favourite living writer. Then in the next letter, while discussing blurbs, his name came up again, since a commendation of his graces Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe. Natural then to send you a novel by this superlative writer. John Maxwell Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940 (he’s now an Australian citizen). He’s been showered with honours, notably two Booker Prizes and the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, and with good reason: he’s an artist of the highest order, characterized by a style that is spare yet highly evocative and novels that are finely crafted, morally engaged and hypnotically compelling. To show him off to you, I’ve selected his third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, published in 1980. The nameless Magistrate who is the story’s protagonist lives in a frontier town on the edges of an equally nameless Empire. Some unbarbaric barbarians—they’re mostly just peaceable nomads and fisherfolk who regularly barter with the townspeople—live just beyond. Relations between the barbarians and the citizens of the town are fine. Life is good and quiet. But then Colonel Joll, from the Third Bureau, arrives and informs the Magistrate that the barbarians are restless and a massive attack by them is imminent. It must be pre-empted. Two barbarians have recently been captured—a boy who is ill and his elderly uncle—allegedly for stealing cattle. They are promptly tortured—tortured—under Joll’s supervision. The uncle dies as a result, while the boy is kept alive only so that he can guide Joll and his acolytes into the desert to capture more barbarians, who are brought back to the town and also tortured. Eventually Joll returns to the capital to make his report. The Magistrate comes upon a barbarian girl begging in the streets. Left behind after her fellow prisoners were released, her ankles have been broken, her eyesight partially ruined, her father tortured and killed before her. He takes her in. But the Magistrate’s descent into moral (and physical) hell has just begun, because Colonel Joll returns, with a battalion of fresh troops….

I leave it to you to discover what happens next. But is there not something about this set-up that sounds familiar? The frontier town, the barbarians, the waiting for their expected invasion—that’s right: it’s very much like the premise of The Tartar Steppe. No coincidence there. Coetzee drew inspiration from Buzzati’s novel, hence his words of praise for the Italian novel: “A strange and haunting novel, an eccentric classic”. Of course, the novels are very different. Whereas The Tartar Steppe is a philosophical novel bathed in sunlight, silence and solitude, Waiting for the Barbarians is a social work, rooted in the body and crowded with people, politics and pain. Coetzee may have started his creative journey with Buzzati, but his destination is one very much his own.

Which leads us to the topic of where writers get their ideas. Like Coetzee, I too have been inspired by books. My novel Life of Pi, for example, was partly inspired by a review I read of the novella Max and the Cats, by the Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar. And then other books, on religion, on animal behaviour and zoo biology, on survival at sea, gave me further ideas and the facts upon which I could weave my story. It is also true that an important source of inspiration for a writer is his or her life. But there’s something grander afoot in fiction than mere autobiography, even with a writer whose life is so interesting a simple accounting of it reads like a novel. Fiction, art in general, is the forum of all possibilities, the agora where ideas of every kind assemble. And so the essential need for the thinking person to dip into art regularly, because in art all of life is discussed and displayed, from its blandest, most conventional manifestation to its most heinous to its most idealistic. The seed of wisdom is planted from contemplating this vast display not only of what life should be but of what life is. To shun art, then, is to shun living beyond the narrow confines of one’s own experience. To plunge into art, on the other hand, is to live multiple lives. Art is a microscope or a telescope, either way making other realities, other worlds, other choices clear to us. Art the pregnant dream from which realities are born.

The nature of inspiration and creativity is relevant to every endeavour. The premium put on creativity varies. In the arts, in the sciences, in commerce, creativity is highly valued, while in politics, I would venture, its value is lower. What a politician wants to claim is to have good ideas, not—necessarily—original ones. Some politicians may have the luck of putting forth ideas that are both good and original—Tommy Douglas’s advocacy of universal public health care is an obvious example of original public policy—but I believe the more common observation is that too much originality is a danger in politics. After all, politics, especially democratic politics, is the most social of activities. Politics is moved forward essentially by meetings and committees; in other words, by people putting their heads together and hammering out policies. The political ideas of the lone, original mind will often be quixotic, simplistic, harebrained or dangerous. I believe your own career shows the truth of what I’m saying, and I mean no disrespect in saying this. Throw your mind back to your early days in the Reform Party, and look at you now. Where has the originality of the Reform Party gone, all those new solutions and new approaches it came up with to solve Canada’s problems? They’ve been ditched and forgotten, that’s what. As Prime Minister, you have slowly been moving to the centre, espousing those trusted ideas that have been built over decades, that may not be original but are tried and true.

The value of a novel, then, is not that you will read it and smack your forehead and scribble down a new bill you intend to propose to the House. No. The originality of fiction addresses the individuality of its reader. How that reader then acts with others—in other words, becomes political—will involve a dilution of that originality, a regard for the conventions and sensibilities of others. And that’s all right. We have to get along with others. But the cost of an artless life is that in being fed no originality, the person’s sense of individuality is eroded. Which is not only sad, but dangerous, since the citizen whose precious individuality is not nourished is more subject to the claims of demagogues and tyrants.

I am straying from J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. It is a fine novel, moral but not in a way that is preachy. Hard to read it and not feel indignation at the wickedness of agents of the state who in the name of the law take the law in their own hands. It is the perfect cautionary tale for a politician.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

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