101 Letters to a Prime Minister

by Yann Martel

  “I have read of a man who lived many thousands of years ago, and of all the names in these books, his is the one I wish to bear. He took the light of the gods and he brought it to men, and he taught men to be gods. And he suffered for his deed as all bearers of light must suffer. His name was Prometheus.”

  Prometheus, the nice guy formerly known as Equality 7–2521, goes on:

  “And I have read of a goddess who was the mother of the earth and of all the gods. Her name was Gaea. Let this be your name, my Golden One, for you are to be the mother of a new kind of gods.”

  What if the Golden One rather fancied herself as a Lynette or a Bobbie-Jean? Who is this Prometheus to tell her what her name should be? And what if she doesn’t want to be the mother of a screaming gaggle of kids? What if one child will do, and a girl if possible, thank you very much?

  But, headstrong as Liberty 5–3000 seemed to be in the City, as Gaea she is passive and submissive, doing as she is told, because nothing and no one should get in the way of Ayn Rand’s romantic Superman, especially not his woman.

  And what does Prometheus intend to do with his new-found freedom? He’ll raid the City for “chosen friends” and conquer the world!

  Here, on this mountain, I and my sons and my chosen friends shall build our new land and our fort.… And the day will come when I shall break all the chains of the earth, and raze the cities of the enslaved, and my home will become the capital of a world where each man will be free to exist for his own sake.

  Well, what does he want, does he want to be free and unfettered or a bustling capital?

  The novel ends, with trumpeting triumphalism, as follows:

  And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner.… The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory.

  The sacred word:

  EGO

  Just the kind of neighbour we all want, the loud, overbearing oaf with the poor, mousy wife who has the word EGO carved over his door.

  That is the paradox and failure of Ayn Rand’s vision. Her response to the excesses of collectivism is an excessive and simplistic egoism. The more realistic challenge in life is to be oneself amidst others, to heed one’s own needs and at the same time satisfy the demands of one’s community. It is not easy. Life, and not only politics, is the art of compromise.

  That push and pull between the needs of the individual and the needs of the collectivity is at the heart of an election. If every voter votes strictly according to self-interest, then the collectivity, the nation, will be riven by discord and divisions and will risk falling apart. But if the collective We is overfed, then its constituent elements are starved. Every politician, and you first and foremost, Mr. Harper, must balance personal interest with what is good for the nation. If you divide and conquer too much, if you heed too little, then the country will suffer, as will your reputation in history. Enlightened statesmanship is required by all, both voters and politicians. But that’s a risky sell, isn’t it, trying to peddle a better future to voters worried about their immediate present? The best is demanded of all of us. I can only hope we will get it.

  Since we have an election on our hands, let me make my personal appeal. Don’t worry, it won’t cost anything. I won’t bay about arts funding or the centrality of art in our lives or even, more cravenly, about the profitability of the arts industry in Canada (what was the sum I read recently, $47 billion in 2007 alone, more than the profits from the mining industry? Not that I buy that argument. The essential is inherently profitable, existentially. The individual who is artless is poor, no matter how much money he or she may have). No, I only want to give you for free an idea, the following:

  What if a reading list were established for prospective prime ministers of Canada, to ensure that they have sufficient imaginative depth to be at the helm of our country? After all, we expect a prime minister to have a fair knowledge of the history and geography of Canada, to know something about economics and public administration, about current events and foreign affairs, the financial assets of a prime minister are accountable to us, so why shouldn’t his or her imaginative assets also be accountable?

  Because that has been the whole point of our literary duet, hasn’t it? If you haven’t read, now or earlier, any of the books I have suggested, or books like them, if you haven’t read The Death of Ivan Ilych or any other Russian novel, if you haven’t read Miss Julia or any other Scandinavian play, if you haven’t read Metamorphosis or any other German-language novel, if you haven’t read Waiting for Godot or To the Lighthouse or any other experimental play or novel, if you haven’t read Artists and Models or any other erotica, if you haven’t read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius or The Educated Imagination or any other philosophical inquiry, if you haven’t read Under Milk Wood or any other poetic prose, if you haven’t read Their Eyes Were Watching God or Drown or any other American novel, if you haven’t read The Cellist of Sarajevo or The Island Means Minago or The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi or any other Canadian novel, poem or play—then what is your mind made of? What materials went into the building of the dreams you have for our country? What is the colour, the pattern, the rhyme and reason of your imagination? These are not questions one is usually entitled to ask, but once someone has power over me, then, yes, I do have the right to probe your imagination, because your dreams may become my nightmares.

  This Prime Minister’s Reading List could be administered by the Speaker of the House of Commons, an impartial figure, perhaps benefiting from recommendations not only from Members of Parliament but from all Canadian citizens. It would be a hard list to set up, that’s for sure. How to represent concisely all that the written word has done, here and abroad, in English and French and other languages? The Prime Minister’s Reading List couldn’t be too long; we wouldn’t want you sitting around reading novels your whole mandate. And it would be subject to regular updates, of course, to reflect changing times and tastes. How to implement the list would be another challenge. Would it be a yearly reading list, or just one at the beginning of each term? And how to check that you’ve actually read the books and not had an assistant summarize them for you? Would you have to write an exam, pen an essay, face a committee, answer questions during a Question Period exclusively devoted to the matter?

  “I have no time for this nonsense,” you might feel like shouting. But as I said to you in my very first letter, there is a space next to every bed where a book can be lying in wait. And I ask you again: what is your mind made of?

  So, would that be an idea, to set up a Prime Minister’s Reading List? What is your position on this vital issue?

  I await your answer.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  AYN RAND (1905–1982) was a Russian-born American novelist, playwright and screenwriter. Her most famous novels are The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Within two weeks of arriving in Hollywood to launch her screenwriting career, Rand was hired as an extra and then a script reader for director Cecil B. DeMille, and met her future husband, the actor Frank O’Connor, to whom she would stay married for fifty years. She was also politically active. Her works prominently reflect a belief in individualism, capitalism and basic civil liberties, as well as her staunch opposition to collectivist political structures.

  BOOK 39:

  MISTER PIP

  BY LLOYD JONES

  September 29, 2008

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  Words take you places.

  Best wishes,

  Lloyd Jones

  September 21

  Brisbane, Australia

  Sent to you by

  a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  Campaigning must be gruelling, especially when you are head of a party. You work and travel constantly, you speak to people morning, noon and eveni
ng, you must always be on your guard, and all of it is very personal. The worst, I imagine, is the complete loss of privacy. Any time you might want for yourself must be sacrificed to the demands of public life.

  An excellent way to climb back into yourself is to read a book. I suspect that reading is such a satisfying experience because it is at one and the same time a dialogue —between your mind and an external source of words—and an entirely private experience. When you are reading, your guard needn’t be up. You can be entirely yourself. Even better: you are totally free. You can read slowly or quickly, you can reread a section or skip it, why, you can even throw the book down and pick up another—it’s all up to you. The freedom goes even further: what you experience while reading is also entirely your own affair. You can let yourself be engrossed by what you are reading, or you can let your mind wander. You can be a receptive reader, or, if you want, an obstreperous one. The freedom, I repeat, is total. When else do we have such a feeling? Is it not the case that in most every other activity, personal or social, we are hemmed in by rules and regulations, by the intrusions and expectations of others?

  Reading is one of the best ways to bring on that essential condition for the thinking person, one that I mentioned at the start of our exchange: stillness. All the noise and confusion of the outer world falls away, is blocked off, when one is reading and one becomes still. Which is to say, one enters into dialogue with oneself, asking questions, coming up with replies, feeling and assessing facts and emotions. That is why reading is so fortifying, because in setting us free it allows us to re-centre ourselves, it allows the mind’s eye to look at itself in a mirror and take stock.

  What better book to bear witness to this process than Mister Pip, by the New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones. Your mind will travel far with this novel. For starters, the story takes place on the Pacific island of Bougainville, part of Papua New Guinea. But it also takes place, in a way, in Victorian England. There’s a quieting appeal right there, isn’t there? Who hasn’t dreamed of spending time on an island in the Pacific, surrounded by blue sea and tropical greenery? And who doesn’t like visiting Europe?

  Mister Pip is a novel about a novel. The name Pip might be familiar to you. It’s the name of the main character in Great Expectations, the novel by Charles Dickens. This is no coincidence. Great Expectations is a character in Jones’s novel, one might say. It is certainly the catalyst to much of the action in it.

  On Bougainville, a white man, Mr. Watts, lives in a village of black people who accept him because he is married to one of them, Grace, who has gone crazy, but of whom Mr. Watts takes loving care. A rebellion shuts down the local mine and results in the evacuation of all the whites who work there. Only Mr. Watts stays on. He and the villagers are cut off from the rest of the world by a blockade. Mr. Watts agrees to become the schoolteacher. But he knows precious little. Chemistry is just a word, and history little more than a list of famous names. One thing he does know and love, though, is Charles Dickens’s great novel. He reads it to the children. They are enchanted. They fall in love with Pip. But their parents and even more so the government troops that routinely descend upon the village to terrorize its inhabitants are suspicious of this Mr. Pip. Where is he hiding? Produce him or else, they warn.

  Lloyd Jones’s novel is about how literature can create a new world. It is about how the world can be read like a novel, and a novel like the world. If that sounds twee, be warned that there is also shocking meanness and violence in Mister Pip.

  Does the violence make the fable-like element pale in comparison? Does “reality” come through and displace the “fiction”? Not at all. You will see. The novel argues that the imagination, whether religious or artistic, is what makes the world bearable.

  I am also sending you Great Expectations. It’s not necessary to have read it to understand Mister Pip, but it is such an enjoyable masterpiece that I thought I’d throw it in as an extra pleasure.

  I had the pleasure of meeting Lloyd Jones just last week at the Brisbane Literary Festival. He kindly agreed to autograph your copy of his novel.

  May you enjoy both Mister Pip and Great Expectations. Better still: may they bring you stillness.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  LLOYD JONES (b. 1955) is a New Zealander who has been publishing books since 1985. His experiences as a journalist and travel writer have imbued his novels with a strong sense of realism. His most recent novel, Mister Pip, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book in 2007. Other well-known works by Jones include Biografi, Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance, Paint Your Wife and The Book of Fame. Several of his novels have been successfully adapted for the stage. Jones has also written books for children, and edited an anthology of sports writing.

  BOOK 40:

  A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

  BY ANTHONY BURGESS

  October 13, 2008

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  “What’s it going to be then, eh?”

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  Meet Alex. He’s the nightmare of both citizens and governments, the first because they are afraid of him and the second because they don’t know what to do with him. Alex, you see, is a-lex, outside the law, from the Latin. He and his friends mug people, loot stores and invade homes, liberally dishing out extreme violence and routinely indulging in gang rape. And to think he’s only fifteen. When he’s caught, he rots in a juvenile home for a while until he’s let out—and then what? Well, why stop when you’re having such a good time? He gets back to the fun of “ultra-violence.” Welcome to the world of A Clockwork Orange, a brilliant short novel by the English writer Anthony Burgess (1917–1993), published in 1962.

  “What’s it going to be then, eh?” That slightly bullying question appears at the beginning of each of the novel’s three sections. It is asked not only of one or another of the story’s characters; it is asked of us. What’s it going to be with Alex then, eh? What are we to do with him? A Clockwork Orange, despite the great violence in it, in fact, because of it, is a morally preoccupied work.

  When Alex is caught after his latest bout of thuggish mayhem, the authorities try a different approach. They try conditioning. If a dog can be conditioned to salivate upon hearing a bell tinkling, why can’t a boy be conditioned to reject violence? Alex is subjected to the Ludovico Method, in which he is given injections that make him feel deathly nauseous at the same time as he is being shown extremely violent films. He thus learns to become sickened by violence, literally. Unfortunately, because of the soundtrack of some of the reels he is forced to watch, Alex is also accidentally conditioned to feel revulsion upon hearing classical music. This aggrieves him greatly because our Alex, despite his brutal tendencies, is a music lover (sounds historically familiar, doesn’t it?).

  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 was still puzzling out all this and wondering whether I should refuse to be strapped down to this chair tomorrow and start a real bit of dratsing with them all, because I had my rights, when another chelloveck came in to see me.

  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?