101 Letters to a Prime Minister (20 page)

A minor matter, the Minister of the Interior feels. Our main problem is solved. Now, when our boy sees violence, when he merely entertains thoughts of violence, he falls over helplessly, clutching his stomach and retching. If he also keels over when he hears Beethoven, so what? That’s just a little collateral damage.

But if goodness is elected not by free choice but as a self-defence mechanism against nausea, is it morally valid goodness? “Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed on him?” the prison chaplain asks at one point. Burgess’s answer is unequivocal: he chooses goodness as a free choice. And the reason why this answer is correct is given in the novel’s key words, coming from Alex, dropped nearly casually in the middle of a long sentence:

I had my rights
. Indeed, Alex does have his rights, as we all do. Ignore those rights, and the essential is lost: “When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”

A group of intellectuals opposed to the government decides to make use of Alex. They lock him in a room next to which they play loud classical music. Alex takes the only exit they’ve left him, an open window. The room is in an apartment block, several floors up. Alex plummets to the sidewalk—and straight into the hearts of citizens indignant at the brainwashing he’s been subjected to. An election is in the offing and the Government is nervous about its prospects. At the hospital where he is recovering from his serious injuries, Alex’s conditioning is hastily reversed. Alex is very happy about this. In the last scene of the penultimate chapter of the novel, we find him lying back, listening with renewed delight to Beethoven’s Ninth. “I was cured all right,” he says.

That line, if it were the last line of the book, would be fiercely ironic. Good that the boy’s ears have been restored, but so has his moral compass. Its fine, trembling needle can now, once again, point as freely towards good as it can towards bad. Does that mean we citizens should start to tremble too? No worries, says Burgess in the last chapter of the book, Chapter 21. Alex’s ordeal has eaten up over two years of his life. He’s now eighteen and has matured. The joys of rape and pillage just aren’t what they used to be. Alex is now more in the mood to find himself a nice girl, settle down and start a family. The novel ends with a softer, mellower Alex pining for a mate.

A weak ending, I’d say. Burgess successfully makes the case for the imperative of freedom at the level of the individual
when making moral choices. But what are we to do at the level of a society? What choices does a society have in the face of citizens who are a-lex? Each of us must be free to be fully ourselves, granted, but how should a society balance the freedom of the individual with the safety of the group? Burgess avoids this difficult question by having Alex suddenly discover the peaceable joys of family life. To a social problem Burgess gives only an unpredictable individual solution. What if Alex had decided to continue with his life of violence?

The American edition of
A Clockwork Orange
was originally published without the last chapter. This editorial cut, which Burgess opposed, does throw the construction of the novel off balance. Nonetheless, Alex’s uncertain claim at the end of Chapter 20 that he is cured is, I think, an ending more consistent with the material that has come earlier. It is this truncated version that Stanley Kubrick used to make his celebrated movie. He too clearly preferred a conclusion that wasn’t so facilely optimistic.

What I’ve said so far may make you think that
A Clockwork Orange
is a blandly pious work, reducible to a few moral bromides. That’s not the case. Just as a hockey game can’t be reduced to its score, so a work of art can’t be reduced to a summary. What makes
A Clockwork Orange
incompressible is its language. Alex and his friends speak a most peculiar English. Here’s a sample, taken at random:

A mixture of English slang and words derived from Russian, delivered in cadences that sometimes sound biblical, at other
times Elizabethan, it is this language, Nadsat, that makes
A Clockwork Orange
an enduring work of literature. It is the juice in the orange. The context makes the meaning of most Nadsat words clear, and the occasional befuddlement is not unpleasant.

Canadians go to the polls tomorrow. I offer you
A Clockwork Orange
the day before for a good reason. There’s an element in the novel that is eerily familiar. The government under which Alex lives is democratically elected, yet it has recourse to policies that undermine the foundations of democracy. We have seen these kinds of policies for eight years now in the United States, a country morally bankrupted by its current president. You claim to have a solution for what to do with Alex. The experts disagree with you, as do the courts and the people; certainly the people in Quebec are resisting your ideas. But you think you know better.

Are you sure, Mr. Harper, that what you have up your sleeve aren’t so many Ludovico Methods?

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S. Have you seen Kubrick’s classic adaptation? It’s one of those rare cases where the movie is as good as the book. I’ll try to find a DVD copy. When I do, I’ll send it along
.

A
NTHONY
B
URGESS
(1917–1993) was a prolific English novelist, poet, playwright, biographer, literary critic, linguist, translator and composer. His publications run the gamut from linguistically sophisticated literary novels like his Malayan trilogy,
The Long Day Wanes
, to criticism of works by James Joyce, to symphonies, to dystopian satires.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Congratulations on your electoral win. You must be pleased with your increased minority. What your continued tenure as prime minister means, among other things, is that our book club has survived. We can now really settle into this business of discussing books. Since we have more time, why don’t we go back in time. Why don’t we start where book talk probably started, along the banks of the river Euphrates. What has become known as the standard version of the epic of
Gilgamesh
was set down between the years 1300 and 1000
BCE
in cuneiform on twelve clay tablets in Babylonian, a dialect of the Akkadian language. But earlier written fragments in Sumerian about the heartbroken king of Uruk date from around 2000
BCE
, and the historical Gilgamesh, well, he died in about 2750
BCE
, just a couple of centuries shy of five thousand years ago.

Gilgamesh
predates Homer and predates the Bible. It is the cultural soil out of which these later texts emerged, which is
why some elements in the epic will sound familiar to you. Before the biblical Flood there was the Great Flood in
Gilgamesh
. Before Noah’s Ark, there was the ship Utnapishtim built, crowded with animals. In
Gilgamesh
, there is an odyssey before the
Odyssey
and there is one who overcame mortality before Jesus of Nazareth overcame it. The theme of a terrible flood also finds itself echoed in the Hindu story of Matsya the fish, Vishnu’s first avatar, and the theme of fear will perhaps remind you of the
Bhagavad Gita
, which I sent you last year. Remember Arjuna’s fear before the battle? It is not dissimilar to Gilgamesh’s fear before death. The inexorableness of fate might remind you of classical Greek thinking, just as the petulance of the Sumerian gods is much like that of the Greek gods.
Gilgamesh
is the mother of all stories. We, as literary animals, start with
Gilgamesh
.

That might make you think that reading the epic will be like staring into a display window of crude stone sculptures in an archaeology museum. Not so, I promise you, certainly not in the version of
Gilgamesh
that I’m sending you, by the American translator Stephen Mitchell. He’s done away with scholarly encrustations and dull fidelity to disjointed fragments (though, if you care, there is a good introduction and lots of notes). Mitchell has sought to be faithful to the spirit of the original, more mindful of the needs of the English reader than the sensibility of the archaeologist.

The result is exhilarating. The prose is simple, vigorous and stately, the action thrillingly dramatic. I encourage you to read the epic aloud. It’s an easy oral read, you will see. Your tongue will not trip, your mind will not stumble. Like the beating of a drum, the cadence of the beats and the repetition of some passages will hold you in thrall.

The mind can be immortal, living forever through ideas. An idea can leap from mind to mind, going down through
the generations, forever keeping ahead of death. The mind of Plato, for example, is still with us, long dead though he is. But the heart? The heart is inescapably mortal. Every heart dies. Of Plato’s heart, its share of things felt, we know nothing.
Gilgamesh
is the story of one man’s heart and its breaking in the face of death. The emotional immediacy is palpable. Gilgamesh, king of great-walled Uruk, won’t seem alien to you because that aggrieved voice pleading directly in your ear isn’t from over four thousand years ago—it’s the pulsing of your own perishable heart. Our only hope is that we might live as authentically as Gilgamesh and find a friend as loving and loyal as Enkidu.

There are some lovely lines. Keep an eye out for “A gust of wind passed,” and “A gentle rain fell onto the mountains.” They glow within their context. And there is a snake that does Gilgamesh a bad turn. That too will be biblically familiar to you. This snake, though, does not proffer; it takes. But the result is the same: unhappy Gilgamesh must accept his fate as a mortal.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

S
TEPHEN
M
ITCHELL
(b. 1943) is a polyglot American translator known for his poetic, rather than literal, translations. He has translated works originally written in German, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Sanskrit and Danish. His other translations include the Hindu text the
Bhagavad Gita
and the Buddhist
Tao Te Ching
. He has also published a collection of poetry, two novels, three works of non-fiction and several children’s books.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Gilgamesh
again. But a very different
Gilgamesh
. The version I sent you two weeks ago took liberties, but the better to serve the original Sumerian classic. One senses that Stephen Mitchell took the broken clay tablets, fitted the pieces together and then adeptly filled in where the cracks made it hard to read. Our guide on that breathless trip across five thousand years to the banks of the Euphrates remained egoless and anonymous. Of Mitchell, we sensed nothing; in fact, we didn’t even think to enquire about him.

With
Gilgamesh
as interpreted by the Canadian poet Derrek Hines, the time travel is in the opposite direction. It’s Mesopotamia that’s yanked into the present day, every speck of archaeological dust blown off. This version is all about liberties, and the clay tablets have been thrown out. Take the opening lines. In the Mitchell version, they go:

With Hines, we get:

Get the picture? You don’t want to read the versions in the wrong order. With the Mitchell, the scope, the vastness, the timelessness of an ancient epic is felt. With the Hines, you might wonder where the epic went. What’s all this
riffing
? Well, that’s it, the riffing is the point. Remember Ishtar’s anger when Gilgamesh rejects her, how she goes to her father, the god Anu, wanting to borrow the Bull of Heaven so that she can unleash it on Uruk? This is what Hines makes of it, Ishtar speaking:

It’s
Gilgamesh
meets Naomi Campbell. Besides the Rubik’s cube, there are a great many other un-Mesopotamian references in the text: atomic blasts, Brueghel, buildings in New York, CAT scans, event horizons, express trains, Marlene Dietrich, oxygen masks, paparazzi, Swiss bank accounts, X-rays, the Wizard of Oz, and so on. This joy in the anachronistic bears witness to the very different approach that Hines takes.