What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A time capsule,
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,

And sometimes books can be time capsules, capturing the intellectual and moral state of a particular era, its joys and anxieties, its tastes and trends. I would say that Douglas Coupland specializes in writing these sorts of books. Take his latest novel, Generation A, which I am offering you this week. From the very first pages it jumps out: the language, the preoccupations, the political and technological references, the humour—they’re all so now. Contrast this, say, to Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych. In that novel, if you remember, context is nothing. The setting, the names of the characters, their class, their dress, the games they play—all these are of minor concern to the reader. One could easily imagine the exact same story being told by an American writer of the 1950s (William Faulkner perhaps), a Japanese writer of the 1960s (Yukio Mishima) or an African writer of the 1970s (Wole Soyinka maybe). In each case, the peripheral details would be different, but the central drama would be the same. Great novels of this kind are often called timeless, because they escape the strictures of time, they don’t seem to age. In fact, timelessness is the most conventional attribute of literary masterpieces. If it’s old and great, then it must be timeless. But what’s wrong with being timely? Must all writers strive for soaring timelessness and leave behind the earthy humus of the local, the topical, the trendy, the here and now? Is the stuff of archaeology not worth our literary consideration?
 
Of course it is, and Douglas Coupland’s Generation A is scintillating proof. I must admit I read the novel enviously. Oh, to have written something so clever, funny, heartfelt and original. The story is set in the very near-future and is variously narrated by Zack, Samantha, Julien, Diana and Harj, who are respectively from the US, New Zealand, France, Canada and Sri Lanka. They are linked by the fact of each having been stung by a bee, an exceptional occurrence in a world where bees are thought to have disappeared. They are eventually brought together by a French scientist, Serge. And then—well, you will see. The narration is layered, there are passages that are very funny, others that are wise, and throughout the language crackles with vitality. It’s a story about reading and storytelling, the power of reading to strengthen the individual and of storytelling to solder the group.
 
Generation A is time specific. Context is everything. And here it’s a quality. In the future, if people are curious about what it was like to live in our times, in the early 21st century, they will do well to read Douglas Coupland.
 
Yours truly,
 
Yann Martel
 
encl: one inscribed hard cover book
 
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