What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Yann Martel
Ashton Grey

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A genie escaping a bottle,
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 weeks ago I was at the Saskatchewan Festival of Words. It’s a friendly celebration of literature held in the pleasant Prairie town of Moose Jaw. I’m sure you’ve been (to the town, I mean). One of the days I was there, as I was leaving the public library where the festival takes place, a man on a park bench hailed me. He was holding a baby in his arms and was sitting next to another man. I might’ve just waved and walked on, but there was that baby. I have a baby. So I approached the two men. It turned out that the other man was the dad, and the genial man who had called out my name was his friend. The three of us chatted for a few minutes. I was about to go when the man holding the baby asked me if I would buy his book. I had noticed the thin volumes spread out in a half-circle on the ground in front of him. ”Special Festival price, seven dollars,” he said. I gave him ten, he signed my copy, and I walked away with Sweet Home Chicago, by Ashton Grey. I saw Mr. Grey again the next day, on Main Street this time, near the Mae Wilson Theatre, still hawking his opus. Someone told me that Mr. Grey, who looked to be in his thirties, couldn’t afford the bus from Winnipeg to Moose Jaw, so he’d hitch-hiked to come sell his book at the Festival of Words. Such dedication, I thought. And he had the good karma earned from holding a baby the previous day.

I decided to read his book and now I pass it on to you. Sweet Home Chicago is forty-nine pages long. I remember Mr. Grey saying on the park bench that he didn’t like calling it a novella. I didn’t ask what he had against the term, but out of respect for his wishes, let’s call it a long short story. If you look on the copyright page, you’ll see that it was “first printed” in 2009 and then printed again by Bindle Stick Publications of Hamilton, Ontario in 2010. The number 3 appears below that information. My guess is that Sweet Home Chicago is onto its third printing. Now, whether Bindle Stick Publications is Mr. Grey’s own self-publishing operation and he lives in Hamilton, Ontario (and how he got from Hamilton to Winnipeg), or whether Mr. Grey lives in Winnipeg and does business with Bindle Stick Publications, a tiny vanity press in Hamilton, Ontario—to all these questions, your guess is as good as mine.

Sweet Home Chicago is a long short story with many flaws. There are lots of spelling mistakes. On the very first page you’ll read the sentence, “He reached over the bar and ceased Ronald’s coat trying to jerk him awake.” Ronald’s coat was more likely “seized”. The dialogue is consistently wrongly punctuated:

“I guess you should call the police.” He said with a voice that expressed his sorrow that nothing else could be done.

That should be a comma after “police” and the personal pronoun that follows should start with a small letter, since the statement is all one sentence. On a broader level, some of the exposition is awkward, many details are unnecessary, and it’s not entirely clear to me what the story is about thematically. And yet it has narrative drive, the characters have their charm, there are funny parts, and underlying it all is an uncynical tenderness. It’s a booze-fuelled story, so to seek out the flaws is to soberly miss the point. Best to read Sweet Home Chicago with the unfocussed, good-humoured indulgence of the slightly drunk. The story relates the consequences to the unnamed protagonist of being in a bar next to a man who has the misfortune of keeling over and dying right then and there. Our hero finds himself in an alcohol-soused pickle.

This story is no Under the Volcano.(Do you know the novel? Malcolm Lowry? It’s Canadian. The overconsumption of alcohol achieves there its greatest literary expression.) But that is another book. The attraction for me in sending you Sweet Home Chicago lies not with the quality of the work but with the intent of the author. It’s Ashton Grey’s strong desire to tell his story that struck me, a desire so strong that he self-published it and now self-promotes it, even hitch-hiking from Winnipeg to Moose Jaw to share it, and all this without any serious chance of critical or commercial success. But that’s what stories do to a person and, collectively, to a people. Stories are like genies: just as a genie wants to escape its bottle, so a story wants to escape the man, woman or child into which it finds itself. A shared story is a living story. Stories are passed down through families and through history. They endure while the storytellers die. Now that Ashton Grey has committed his story to the page, it will live on. That is a good thing. We need stories, all kinds of stories, because without stories, our imagination dies, and without imagination, there is no real appreciation of life. You have the luck of owning one of the few copies of Sweet Home Chicago. I hope you realize what a rare privilege that is.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one paperback, inscribed both by the author and by me

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