What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Your move,
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,

Do you play chess? I’m sure you have. It has a rare allure among games. Stefan Zweig puts it nicely:

…ancient yet eternally new; mechanical in structure, yet made effective only by the imagination; limited to a geometrically fixed space, yet with unlimited combinations; constantly developing, yet sterile; thought that leads nowhere; mathematics calculating nothing; art without works of art; architecture without substance–but nonetheless shown to be more durable in its entity and existence than all books and works of art; the only game that belongs to all nations and all eras, although no one knows what god brought it down to earth to vanquish boredom, sharpen the senses and stretch the mind. Where does it begin and where does it end?

(It occurs to me that Zweig’s musing could also apply to sex, except for the invocation of sterility, but that’s neither here nor there.) Chess is a game of stumping complexity. With the exception of go, I can’t think of another game that offers so many possible plays. And there’s another appeal to chess: the complete absence of luck. Chess is an entirely logical game in which there is no “luck of the draw”. You win or you lose entirely based on the mental powers you bring to the chequered board. And so the aura of genius that surrounds the great chess players of history. But if genius it is, it’s a peculiar one, deep perhaps but also very narrow, confined to the movements of pieces on a board. Bobby Fisher once said, “Chess is life.” Well, not really. Life very much has an element of luck to it, the luck of where and to whom we are born, the luck of our genetic inheritance, the luck of our circumstances, and so on. Nor is life logical. In fact, according to a good number of thinkers and writers, it’s not even certain that life makes sense. But chess has simple rules that yield a vastly complex game, just as life, one might argue, has simple rules that yields a vastly complex experience. And we meet opposition in life, just as there is opposition in chess, black against white. So the parallel is rough, but it pleases, this simplification of life in which only force of personality matters and fate is entirely in one’s own hands. One looks at the chessboard and imagines a battle scene—or perhaps Question Period.

Stefan Zweig’s Chess (also known at The Royal Game or Chess Story) was published posthumously after the author’s suicide in 1942 in Brazil, to which he had fled with his wife to escape the Nazis. Zweig is the quintessentially continental European writer of the interwar period, a man caught between bloodbaths who tried to make sense of a world gone mad. He did this by applying himself to the “real” world in a series of biographies and by “escaping” that world in works such as Chess. But escape is never possible. The reality of Zweig’s life seeped into his fiction. You will see this in Chess. The story takes place over the course of a few days on a passenger steamer travelling from New York to Buenos Aires. Aboard is the world chess champion, Mirko Czentovic. Some chess amateurs lure him into a game, him against all of them. Czentovic easily defeats them. They play again. The amateurs look like they’re once again going to lose. But then a voice from the crowd makes a surprising suggestion for the next move. They follow his advice, as they do for the following moves, each given urgently by this stranger. To their amazement, the game ends in a draw. The stranger reluctantly agrees to play a game one-on-one the next day with the world champion. But who is this stranger? Where—how—did he acquire his prowess at chess? Chess has that unity of time, action and place that Aristotle said was a key characteristic of the good story, and it is a good story indeed. It sucks you in. You climb aboard the ship in your mind and you hurry, like the chess players, to the smoking room where the games are being played. But despite the appealing fictional setting, so removed from the world and its hurly-burly, the world can’t be so easily forgotten. Stefan Zweig’s experience with the Nazis infuses the middle section of his novella. Chess there is portrayed as a necessary escapism, an obsession that allows his character to hold onto sanity.

Because that is another appeal that chess holds: a game that is entirely logical, where wild emotions have no play, where rigorous sanity wins the day and defeat comes only from an inner lapse of reason, such a game, in a world gone mad, is a relief.

Perhaps there are days on Parliament Hill when you feel like retreating to your office and playing chess, Mr. Harper. After all, you’re still stuck with a minority government, and then there’s the uproar over proroguing Parliament, the fight over the Afghan detainee documents, the billion-dollar summits, the furore over the elimination of the mandatory census, the fruitless effort to kill the gun registry, the fury of the veterans ombudsman, and other controversies—these must wear you down. You like to be in control. You have notions about how things should be, but constantly you don’t get your way. Constantly, the unpredictable happens. Wouldn’t it be nice if politics were a chess game and you could just sit down and bully your way to a checkmate?

Alas, thankfully, the political system in Canada is not so arranged. Instead, you’re playing a life game in which you’ve lost a fair number of pawns. How will the game end, I wonder?

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

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