101 Letters to a Prime Minister (23 page)

In the meantime, to help you not only in dealing with the new Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition but also as an aid in setting policy, I am sending you
The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror
, a more recent book by your fellow parliamentarian, published in 2004. The cover seems uninspiring. It was chosen for a good reason: it’s a photograph of a staircase at Auschwitz. Up and down those stairs went people who were in the grip of political ethics gone terribly wrong. As I said, there’s nothing abstract about Mr. Ignatieff’s concerns. He looks at real-life political dilemmas and seeks to find out what went wrong and how those wrongs might be made right.

The Lesser Evil
is a study on liberal democracies and terrorism. How do people who value freedom and dignity handle those who commit senseless violence against them? What is the right balance between the competing demands of rights and security? What can a democratic society allow itself to do and still call itself democratic? These are some of the questions that Mr. Ignatieff tries to answer. He looks at nations as diverse as Russia, the United Kingdom, the U.S., Germany, Italy, Spain, Sri Lanka, Chile, Argentina, Israel and Palestine, in their current state but also historically, to see how they have dealt with assaults by terrorists. He also makes literary references, to Dostoyevsky and Conrad, to Euripides and Homer. Throughout, the approach is open, fair and critical, the analysis is rigorous and insightful, the conclusions are wise. Last but not least, the style is engaging. Mr. Ignatieff has a fine pen. My favourite line in the book is this one, on page 121: “Liberal states cannot be protected by herbivores.”

Mr. Ignatieff is a passionate yet subtle defender of liberal democracies and he finds that generally the tools they already have at their disposal will do in times of terrorist threat. Indeed, he argues that overreaction to a threat can do more long-term harm to a liberal democracy than the threat itself. The U.S. Patriot Act and Canada’s Bill C-36 are two examples Mr. Ignatieff gives of well-meaning but redundant and misguided attempts to deal with terrorism. When the regular tools won’t do, he acknowledges that the choices faced by liberal democracies are difficult. He makes the case that when a society that values freedom and human dignity is confronted with a threat to its existence, it must move beyond rigid moral perfectionism or outright utilitarian necessity and—carefully, mindfully, vigilantly—follow a path of lesser evil, that is, allow itself to commit some infringements of the part in order to save the
whole. It is a position that seeks to reconcile the
realism
necessary to fight terrorism with the
idealism
of our democratic values. To work one’s way through such treacherous ground, to get down to details and talk about torture and preemptive military action, to give just two examples, requires a mind that is tough, sharp and brave. I’m glad to say that Mr. Ignatieff has such a mind.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

M
ICHAEL
I
GNATIEFF
(b. 1947) was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada from 2009 to 2011. Prior to his political career, Ignatieff held several prominent positions in academia and broadcasting. He has been on the faculty of the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Toronto, and was the director from 2000 to 2005 of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. During his time in England, he worked as a documentary filmmaker and political commentator with the BBC. Ignatieff is the author of sixteen books, including a biography of Isaiah Berlin and three novels.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Well, with a budget like that, you might as well be a socialist. Remarkable how much your government has vowed to spend. Your days as a radical Reformer, determined to shrink the government like a wool sweater in a hot water wash, must be from a former life. I wonder what your friends at the National Citizens Coalition think? (Why is there no apostrophe in the name of that organization? I checked their website and that’s how they spell it. Are they so committed to free enterprise and fearful of social commitment that they won’t put the Citizens in the possessive case?)

I gather Michael Ignatieff was amused to hear echoes of his own statements in the recent Speech from the Throne (I enclose a
Globe and Mail
article). Don’t worry, you’re not the only one echoing him. President Obama (I do like the ring of that), in explaining why he was closing down the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay and the CIA’s secret overseas prisons and
repealing other dubious counterterrorism measures taken by George W. Bush, used words that could have been Mr. Ignatieff’s. How our liberal democratic ideals must be reflected in our actions, how we cannot lightly sacrifice rights for the sake of excessive security expediency, how we will triumph over our enemies by keeping faith with our ideals, not by abandoning them, and so on—it’s all entirely in the spirit of the forty-seventh book in our library,
The Lesser Evil
. Clearly Mr. Ignatieff’s views are shared by many, influenced by and feeding into a current of thought that is now becoming widely accepted, so you do well to open yourself to it.

Speaking of President Obama, it’s because of him that I’m sending you the novel
Gilead
, by the American writer Marilynne Robinson. It’s one of his favourite novels. It turns out Barack Obama is a reader, a big reader. And the books he has read and cherished have not only been practical texts that someone interested in governance would likely favour. No, he also likes poetry, fiction, philosophy: the Bible, Shakespeare’s tragedies, Melville, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, the poets Elizabeth Alexander and Derek Walcott, the philosophers Reinhold Niebuhr and St. Augustine, and many more. They’ve formed his oratory, his thinking, his very being. He’s a man-built-by-words and he has impressed the whole world.

I would sincerely recommend that you read
Gilead
before you meet President Obama on February 19. For two people who are meeting for the first time, there’s nothing like talking about a book that both have read to create common ground and a sense of intimacy, of knowing the other in a small but important way. After all, to like the same book implies a similar emotional response to it, a shared recognition of the world reflected in it. This is assuming, of course, that you like the book.

That shouldn’t be too hard. There is much to like in
Gilead
. It’s a slow, honest novel, suffused with wonder and amazement (those two words come up often in the book), and surprisingly religious, practically devotional. There are no chapters, just entries divided by a blank line, as if it were a diary. The narration is leisurely and episodic, giving the impression of a ramble, but it’s actually a carefully constructed novel, building in power as it goes along. There is no facile irony, no seeking to please by the easy recourse of humour. Instead, the tone is sober, gentle, intelligent. The story is told by John Ames, an aged preacher who is ill with a heart condition that will kill him soon enough. He has a seven-year-old son come to him late in life as a result of an autumnal marriage to a much younger, much loved woman. He wants his son to know something of his father, and of his father’s father, and of his father’s father’s father—all of them named John Ames and all of them preachers—so he writes a long letter for his son to read when he is of age. The style is on the surface effortless, a plain, poetic speech with much about God and God’s people and the meaning of it all, with a few references to baseball. Very American, then, a novel one could imagine Ralph Waldo Emerson having written if Emerson had written fiction.
Gilead
is a graceful work, suffused with grace, and it has the luminous feel of the profound. It’s a book that aspires to be a church, quiet, sparely furnished, whitely lit, filled with Presence and steeped in the essential. If there’s a novel that should give you a sense of stillness, it is this one.

I hope you like it. And if you don’t, remember nonetheless that it is one of the keys that will let you into the mind of the current President of the United States.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

M
ARILYNNE
R
OBINSON
(b. 1943) is the American author of two works of non-fiction,
Mother Country
and
The Death of Adam
, and three novels. Her first novel,
Housekeeping
, won a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and earned her a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her second novel,
Gilead
, won several awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the Ambassador Book Award. Robinson earned a Ph.D. from the University of Washington and at present teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Dear Mr. Harper,

The famous Ernest Hemingway.
The Old Man and the Sea
is one of those works of literature that most everyone has heard of, even those who haven’t read it. Despite its brevity—127 pages in the well-spaced edition I am sending you—it’s had a lasting effect on English literature, as has Hemingway’s work in general. I’d say that his short stories, gathered in the collections
In Our Time, Men without Women
and
Winner Take Nothing
, among others, are his greatest achievement—and above all, the story “Big Two-Hearted River”—but his novels
The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms
and
For Whom the Bell Tolls
are more widely read.

The greatness of Hemingway lies not so much in what he said as how he said it. He took the English language and wrote it in a way that no one had written it before. If you compare Hemingway, who was born in 1899, and Henry James, who died in 1916, that overlap of seventeen years seems astonishing, so contrasting are their styles. With James, truth, verisimilitude,
realism, whatever you want to call it, is achieved by a baroque abundance of language. Hemingway’s style is the exact opposite. He stripped the language of ornamentation, prescribing adjectives and adverbs to his prose the way a careful doctor would prescribe pills to a hypochondriac. The result was prose of revolutionary terseness, with a cadence, vigour and elemental simplicity that bring to mind a much older text: the Bible.

That combination is not fortuitous. Hemingway was well versed in biblical language and imagery and
The Old Man and the Sea
can be read as a Christian allegory, though I wouldn’t call it a religious work, certainly not in the way the book I sent you two weeks ago,
Gilead
, is. Rather, Hemingway uses Christ’s passage on Earth in a secular way to explore the meaning of human suffering. “Grace under pressure” was the formulation Hemingway offered when he was asked what he meant by “guts” in describing the grit shown by many of his characters. Another way of putting that would be the achieving of victory through defeat, which matches more deeply, I think, the Christ-like odyssey of Santiago, the old man of the title. For concerning Christ, that was the Apostle Paul’s momentous insight (some would call it God’s gift): the possibility of triumph, of salvation, in the very midst of ruination. It’s a message, a belief, that transforms the human experience entirely. Career failures, family disasters, accidents, disease, old age—these human experiences that might otherwise be tragically final instead become threshold events.

As I was thinking about Santiago and his epic encounter with the great marlin, I wondered whether there was any political dimension to his story. I came to the conclusion that there isn’t. In politics, victory comes through victory and defeat only brings defeat. The message of Hemingway’s poor Cuban fisherman is purely personal, addressing the individual in each one of us and
not the roles we might take on. Despite its vast exterior setting,
The Old Man and the Sea
is an intimate work of the soul. And so I wish upon you what I wish upon all of us: that our return from the high seas be as dignified as Santiago’s.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

E
RNEST
H
EMINGWAY
(1899–1961) was an American journalist, novelist and short story writer. He is internationally acclaimed for his works
The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls
and his Pulitzer Prize–winning novella,
The Old Man and the Sea
. Hemingway’s writing style is characteristically straightforward and understated, featuring tightly constructed prose. He drove an ambulance in World War I, and was a key figure in the circle of expatriate artists and writers in Paris in the 1920s known as the “Lost Generation.” Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

Dear Mr. Harper,

The gentle yet probing questioning, the lightness of touch, the accuracy of statement, the keen moral awareness, the constant intelligence—finally, it’s only Jane Austen’s irony that is missing from this excellent look at her life by Carol Shields, which is fitting since a fair-minded biography isn’t the most suitable place for broad irony. Otherwise, without any attempt at imitation or pastiche, this book is so much in the spirit of its subject, so intimately concerned with the meaning of being a writer, that one can nearly imagine that one is reading
Carol Shields: A Life
, by Jane Austen. Not that Carol Shields intrudes on the text in an unseemly way. Not at all. Aside from the brief prologue, the personal pronoun
I
to designate the biographer never appears. This book is entirely a biography of Jane Austen. But the spirit of the two, of the English novelist who lived between 1775 and 1817 and of the Canadian novelist who lived between 1935 and 2003, are so kindred that the book exudes a feeling of friendship rather than of analysis.