What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
If only we really were experts,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes for Christmas and the New Year,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

R. K. Narayan is the mercifully shortened nom de plume of Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Iyer Narayanswamy. He was Indian and lived from 1906 to 2001. If you’ve never heard of Narayan, look at the commendations on the back of the book I’m sending you this week, the novel The Financial Expert, and you will see the kinds of writers with whom Narayan is classed: Tolstoy, Henry James, Chekhov, Turgenev, Conrad, Gogol, Jane Austen. One commentator makes mention of the Nobel Prize, which Narayan never obtained but would have well deserved. I remember reading an interview with Narayan in an Indian newspaper on my second visit to India and feeling a sense of privilege that I was in his country while he was still alive. R. K. Narayan was a gentle giant of English-language literature.

Like William Faulkner with his apocryphal Yoknapatawpha County and Thomas Hardy with his semi-fictional Wessex region, Narayan invented a place, the town of Malgudi, and then spun fictional tales about it, but all so that he might speak about real life. His characters are ordinary enough and their lives move along in ways that are neither settled nor too jarring, yet the grand march of existence, its glory and its misery, rise up from the pages of his novels. Notice the language of The Financial Expert. Aside from the odd word or phrase—dhoti, sacred thread, betel leaves, a lakh—the English is nearly classical, and Narayan’s portrayal of India is neither folkloric nor exaggerated. He speaks not of India-the-peculiar, but of India-the-universal.

The Financial Expert tells the story of Margayya, the expert of the title, who lives on the edges of the banking world of Malgudi, helping peasants fill out forms and secure loans. His office is no more than a piece of lawn in the shade of a banyan tree and the tools of his trade are all contained in a little box. Margayya has large ambitions, though not, it seems, any way of fulfilling them. But Lakshmi, Goddess of Wealth, for whom he prays and fasts for forty days, finds grace in him and Margayya manages to do well for himself. But at a price: he becomes wealthy with money, but poor in his relations with his wife and son and others. As you can imagine, this price will have to be paid.

Margayya’s fortunes are determined by turns of fate as incalculable as a win at bingo. For example, his first wave of wealth comes as a result of publishing a book. He is not its author. It is penned by one Dr. Pal, who, quite unexpectedly, gives him the manuscript, no strings attached. Later on, Margayya and his wife receive a letter saying that their estranged son, Balu, has died. The news proves to be false, the product of a madman who writes postcards to people he selects randomly to inform them of false calamities. I believe the arbitrariness of fate is the theme of The Financial Expert, and the title is therefore ironic: we are experts at nothing. We are rather at the mercy of the gods, Narayan is saying, and any sense of control that we might have is illusion. What do you think of this interpretation of the novel?

Christmas is upon us and then a New Year, and so I wish you and your family health and happiness and the serenity to accept what 2010 will bring.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S. Copenhagen—what a mess. It would be interesting to read The Financial Expert, published in 1952, long before climate change was detected, in the light of that disastrous, save-the-world conference.

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

Reply:

Pending…