101 Letters to a Prime Minister (31 page)

The nature of inspiration and creativity is relevant to every endeavour. The premium put on creativity varies. In the arts, in the sciences, in commerce, creativity is highly valued, while in politics, I would venture, its value is lower. A politician wants to claim to have good ideas, not necessarily original ones. Some politicians may have the luck of putting forward ideas that are both good and original—Tommy Douglas’s advocacy
of universal public health care is an obvious example of original public policy—but I believe the more common observation is that too much originality is a danger in politics. After all, politics, especially democratic politics, is the most social of activities. Politics is moved forward essentially by meetings and committees; that is, by people putting their heads together and hammering out policies. The political ideas of the lone, original mind will often be quixotic, simplistic, hare-brained or dangerous. I believe your own career shows the truth of what I’m saying. Throw your mind back to your early days in the Reform Party, and look at you now. What happened to the originality of the Reform Party, to all those new solutions and new approaches it came up with to solve Canada’s problems? They’ve been ditched and forgotten, that’s what. As Prime Minister, you have slowly been moving to the centre, espousing those trusted ideas that have been built over decades, that may not be original but are tried and true.

The value of a novel, then, is not that you will read it and smack your forehead and scribble down a new bill you intend to propose to the House. No. The originality of fiction addresses the individuality of its reader. How that reader then acts with others—in other words, becomes political—will involve a dilution of that originality, a regard for the conventions and sensibilities of others. And that’s all right. We have to get along with others. But the cost of an artless life is that in being fed no originality, the person’s sense of individuality is eroded. Which is not only sad but dangerous, since the citizen whose precious individuality is not nourished is more easily led astray by the claims of demagogues and tyrants.

But to return to J. M. Coetzee’s
Waiting for the Barbarians
: it is a fine novel, moral but not in a way that is preachy. Hard to read it and not feel indignation at the wickedness of agents of
the state who in the name of the law take the law in their own hands. It is the perfect cautionary tale for a politician.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

J. M. C
OETZEE
(b. 1940) is a South African novelist, literary critic, academic and translator who now lives in Australia. His novels have twice won the Booker Prize—for
Life & Times of Michael K
and
Disgrace
—and in 2003 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. He is also an advocate for animal rights.

Dear Mr. Harper,

And sometimes a book can be a time capsule, capturing the intellectual and moral state of a particular era, its joys and anxieties, its tastes and trends. I would say that Douglas Coupland specializes in writing books of this nature. Take his latest novel,
Generation A
, which I am offering you this week. From the very first pages it jumps out: the language, the preoccupations, the political and technological references, the humour—they’re all so
now
. Contrast this with, say, Tolstoy’s
Ivan Ilych
. In that novel, if you remember, context is nothing. The setting, the names of the characters, their class, their dress, the games they play—all these are of minor concern to the reader. One could easily imagine the exact same story being told by an American writer of the 1950s (William Faulkner, perhaps), a Japanese writer of the 1960s (Yukio Mishima) or an African writer of the 1970s (Wole Soyinka, maybe). In each case the peripheral details would be different, but the central drama would be the
same. Great novels of this kind are often called timeless because they escape the strictures of time and don’t seem to age. In fact, timelessness is the most conventional attribute of literary masterpieces. If it’s old and great, then it must be timeless. But what’s wrong with being
timely
? Must all writers strive for soaring timelessness and leave behind the earthy humus of the local, the topical, the trendy, the here and now? Is the stuff of archaeology not worth our literary consideration?

Of course it is, and Douglas Coupland’s
Generation A
is scintillating proof. I must admit I read the novel enviously. Oh, to have written something so clever, funny, heartfelt and original. The story is set in the very near future and is variously narrated by Zack, Samantha, Julien, Diana and Harj, who are respectively from the United States, New Zealand, France, Canada and Sri Lanka. They are linked by the fact of each having been stung by a bee, an exceptional occurrence in a world where bees are thought to have disappeared. They are eventually brought together by a French scientist, Serge. And then—well, you will see. The narration is layered, there are passages that are very funny, others that are wise, and the language crackles with vitality throughout. It’s a story about reading and storytelling, the power of reading to strengthen the individual and of storytelling to solder the group together.

Generation A
is time-specific. Context is everything. And here, it’s a quality. In the future, if people are curious about what it was like to live in our times, in the early twenty-first century, they will do well to read Douglas Coupland.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

D
OUGLAS
C
OUPLAND
was born on a NATO base in Germany in 1961. He is the author of the international bestseller
Jpod
and thirteen other novels including
Player One
(his novelized Massey Lecture),
The Gum Thief, Hey Nostradamus!, All Families Are Psychotic
and
Generation X
. He is also a visual artist and sculptor, furniture designer, clothing designer (for Roots) and screenwriter. His most recent book is the collection
Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People
, illustrated by Graham Roumieu.

Dear Mr. Harper,

I’m afraid this is going to be a busy letter. The book first of all. The novel
Property
, by the American writer Valerie Martin, was fervently recommended to me some time ago. I finally got around to reading it last week and I’m glad I did so. It’s a hypnotic read. From the very first paragraph, I was sucked into the morally corrupt life of Manon Gaudet, a woman of the American South from around the year 1810. Manon and her detestable husband own slaves, but it can also be said that slavery owns them.
Property
is about the insidious nature of injustice, how a system that is corrupt destroys not only its victims but also perverts its victimizers, blind though the victimizers may be to the injustice. So Manon owns Sarah, a beautiful slave who is her husband’s mistress, but she cannot
own
Sarah and then blithely live her
own
life. I italicize those two owns, one a verb used to indicate the ownership of another human life, and the other an adjective to indicate the ownership of Manon’s life,
because the first precludes the second, the verb precludes the adjective. Manon cannot own Sarah and then live an unsullied moral life. Her slaves obsess and corrupt her, as they do her husband and the entire white class of the antebellum South. Antebellum and postbellum, actually; the American South is still getting over the scars of slavery. The title of the novel is very apt. Sarah the slave is Manon’s property, but Manon is little more than the property of her husband because of the patriarchal society in which they live, and both are the property of the appalling system that was slavery.

The novel works because of the intelligent voice of its narrator. Manon is unremitting in her aversion to hypocrisy, her own and that of the people around her, but she never manages to improve herself. She is lucidly corrupt, her heart poisoned and her life bitter. It makes for a fascinating story, one that is contemporary, even eternal, because the nature of systems is to exercise an insidious power, for better and for worse. An educational system can improve us, for example, while an economic system can corrupt us.

I was in Ottawa promoting my book of letters to you and while there I did a reading at a studio and workshop on Elm Street called Patrick Gordon Framing. When I got there I was surprised to find that a show of paintings had been organized around the theme of our little book club. Over twenty-five artists had used the books I sent you as their inspiration. It makes for a great show. I include an invitation to the opening. The show runs until December 19. You can also find information on it at
www.patrickgordonframing.ca
.

One piece in particular struck me. The artist Michèle Provost took the first line of the first book I sent you (
The Death of Ivan Ilych
), the second line of the second book (
Animal Farm
), the third from the third (The
Murder of Roger Ackroyd
), the fourth from the fourth (
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
), and so on, for the first sixty-five books, and she strung these sentences together to create a work called
A Right Honourable Summary
. This random arrangement of words or sentences to create a text with a surprising new meaning was a game invented by the French Surrealists. They called it
cadavre exquis
, exquisite corpse, the coinage coming from one of the first times they played the game. The result of a
cadavre exquis
delights by the mad juxtapositions that chance creates. Provost’s
cadavre exquis
is particularly successful. She was at my reading in Ottawa and she kindly gave me two copies of a beautiful, handmade audiobook version of
A Right Honourable Summary
, one copy for you (number 1 of 12) and one for me (number 6 of 12). It comes with a booklet that has on its last pages tiny, colourful reproductions of all the book covers. To see all those covers lined up like that is not only visually arresting, it’s also a great aid in identifying the origin of the lines in the audio book. Lynda Cronin reads the text in a convincing manner, weaving with her voice a story that Leo Tolstoy, George Orwell, Agatha Christie, Elizabeth Smart and all the other authors I have sent you could not have imagined. To give you a taste, here’s how it starts:

And so on. It’s a most curious and bracing new tale.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

V
ALERIE
M
ARTIN
(b. 1948) is the author of nine novels, three collections of short stories and a biography of St. Francis of Assisi. She was raised in New Orleans and now lives in upstate New York. Her novel
Mary Reilly
won the Kafka Prize and was made into a film.
Property
won the 2003 Orange Prize.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Perhaps you’ve already read the book that accompanies this letter. I can’t imagine that someone before me hasn’t thought of offering it to you. You’re a big hockey fan and
Tropic of Hockey: My Search for the Game in Unlikely Places
by Dave Bidini is all about hockey. But I’d say it’s a cut above most hockey books because it’s written by someone who (a) has the game in his blood, and (b) knows how to write. The hockey knowledge is evident. The book is replete with anecdotes, stories and events from the history of hockey, featuring a good number of players who will be familiar to you, I’m sure, but were unknown to me. And the knowledge goes deeper than that. This is no academic or journalistic account. Bidini is hockey mad. As he relates in his book, he played as a teen, but gave up when the pressure became too much. Then as an adult he started to play again in a rec league in Toronto and hockey became a central part of his life. So this book is both knowledgeable and personal.