101 Letters to a Prime Minister Read online

  How clearly and concisely our vain and callous ways are showed up. Effortlessly, Tolstoy examines life’s shallow exteriors as well as its inner workings. And yet this pageant of folly and belated wisdom comes not like a dull moral lesson, but with all the weight, shine and freshness of real life. We see, vividly, Ivan Ilych’s errors—oh, they are so clear to us, we certainly aren’t making his mistakes—until one day we realize that someone is looking at us as if we were a character in The Death of Ivan Ilych.

  That is the greatness of literature, and its paradox, that in reading about fictional others we end up reading about ourselves. Sometimes this unwitting self-examination provokes smiles of recognition, while other times, as in the case of this book, it provokes shudders of worry and denial. Either way, we are the wiser, we are existentially thicker.

  One quality that you will no doubt notice is how despite the gulf of time between when the story is set—1882—and today, despite the vast cultural distance between provincial tsarist Russia and modern Canada, the story reaches us without the least awkwardness. In fact, I can’t think of a story that while completely set in its time, so very, very Russian, so leaps from the bounds of the local to achieve universal resonance. A peasant in China, a migrant worker in Kuwait, a shepherd in Africa, an engineer in Florida, a prime minister in Ottawa—I can imagine all of them reading The Death of Ivan Ilych and nodding their heads.

  Above all else, I recommend the character Gerasim to you. I suspect he is the character in whom we recognize ourselves the least yet whom we yearn the most to be like. We hope one day, when the time comes, to have someone like Gerasim at our side.

  I know you’re very busy, Mr. Harper. We’re all busy. Meditating monks in their cells are busy. That’s adult life, filled to the ceiling with things that need doing. (It seems only children and the elderly aren’t plagued by lack of time—and notice how they enjoy their books, how their lives fill their eyes.) But every person has a space next to where they sleep, whether a patch of pavement or a fine bedside table. In that space, at night, a book can glow. And in those moments of docile wakefulness, when we begin to let go of the day, then is the perfect time to pick up a book and be someone else, somewhere else, for a few minutes, a few pages, before we fall asleep. And there are other possibilities, too. Sherwood Anderson, the American writer best known for his collection of stories Winesburg, Ohio, wrote his first stories while commuting by train to work. Stephen King apparently never goes to his beloved baseball games without a book that he reads during breaks. So it’s a question of choice.

  And I suggest you choose, just for a few minutes every day, to read The Death of Ivan Ilych.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  REPLY:

  May 8, 2007

  Dear Mr. Martel:

  On behalf of the Prime Minister, I would like to thank you for your recent letter and the copy of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych. We appreciated reading your comments and suggestions regarding the novel.

  Once again, thank you for taking the time to write.

  Sincerely,

  Susan I. Ross

  Assistant to the Prime Minister

  LEO TOLSTOY (1828–1910) was a prolific author, essayist, dramatist, philosopher and educational reformist. Born into an aristocratic Russian family, he is best known for writing realist fiction, focusing particularly on life in Russia, and is considered one of the major contributors to nineteenth-century Russian literature. His marriage to Sophia Tolstaya (Tolstoy) produced thirteen children, eight of whom survived into adulthood. Tolstoy wrote fourteen novels (two of his most famous being Anna Karenina and War and Peace), several essays and works of non-fiction, three plays and over thirty short stories.

  BOOK 2:

  ANIMAL FARM

  BY GEORGE ORWELL

  April 30, 2007

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  P.S. Happy birthday

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  Now that your Flames have been knocked out of the playoffs I guess you’ll have more free time on your hands.

  I fear that some may criticize me for the second book I am sending you, Animal Farm, by George Orwell. It’s so well known, and it’s another book by a dead white male. But there is time yet to be representative of all those who have harnessed the word to express themselves—believe me, they are varied and legion—unless you lose the next election, which would likely give you even more time to read, but not, alas, according to my suggestions.

  Many of us read Animal Farm when we were young—perhaps you did too—and we loved it because of the animals and the wit. But it’s in our more mature years that its import can better be understood.

  Animal Farm has some commonalities with The Death of Ivan Ilych: both are short, both show the reality-changing power of great literature, and both deal with folly and illusion. But whereas Ivan Ilych deals with individual folly, the failure of one individual to lead an authentic life, Animal Farm is about collective folly. It is a political book, which won’t be lost on someone in your line of business. It deals with one of the few matters on which we can all agree: the evil of tyranny. Of course a book cannot be reduced to its theme. It’s in the reading that a book is great, not in what it seeks to discuss.

  But I also have a personal reason for why I’ve chosen Animal Farm: I aspire to write a similar kind of book.

  Animal Farm first. You will notice right away the novel’s limpid and unaffected style, Orwell’s hallmark. You get the impression the words just fell onto the page, as if it were the easiest, the most natural thing in the world to write such sentences and paragraphs and pages. It’s not. To think clearly and to express oneself clearly are both hard work. But I’m sure you know that from working on speeches and papers.

  The story is simple. The animals of Manor Farm have had enough of Farmer Jones and his exploitative ways so they rebel, throw him out, and set up a commune run according to the highest and most egalitarian principles. But there’s a rotten pig named Napoleon and another one named Squealer—a good talker he—and they are the nightmare that will wreck the dream of Animal Farm, as the farm is renamed, despite the best efforts of brave Snowball, another pig, and the meek goodness of most of the farm animals.

  I’ve always found the end of Chapter II very moving. There’s the question of five pails of milk from the cows. What to do with them, now that Farmer Jones is gone and the milk won’t be sold? Mix it with the mash they all eat, hints a chicken. “Never mind the milk, comrades!” cries Napoleon. “The harvest is more important. Comrade Snowball will lead the way. I shall follow in a few minutes.” And so off the animals go, to bring in the harvest. And the milk? Well, “… in the evening it was noticed that the milk had disappeared.”

  With those five pails of white milk the ideal of Animal Farm, still so young, begins to die, because of Napoleon’s corrupted heart. Things only get worse, as you will see.

  Animal Farm is a perfect exemplar of one of the things that literature can be: portable history. A reader who knows nothing about twentieth-century history? Who has never heard of Joseph Stalin or Leon Trotsky or the October Revolution? Not a problem: Animal Farm will convey to that reader the essence of what happened to our neighbours across the Arctic. The perversion of an ideal, the corruption of power, the abuse of language, the wrecking of a nation—it’s all there, in a scant 120 pages. And having read those pages, the reader is made wise to the ways of the politically wicked. That too is what literature can be: an inoculation.

  And now the personal reason why I’ve sent you Animal Farm: the Jewish people of Europe murdered at the hands of the Nazis also need to have their history made portable. And that is what I’m trying to do with my next book. But to take the rubble of history—so many tears, so much bloodshed—and distil it into some few elegant pages, to turn horror into something light—it’s no easy feat.<
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  I offer you, then, a literary ideal of mine, besides a great read.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  P.S. Happy birthday.

  GEORGE ORWELL (1903–1950), born Eric Arthur Blair, was an English novelist, journalist, essayist, poet and literary critic. He was born in India into what he called a “lower-upper-middle class” family. He fought and was wounded in the Spanish Civil War. His two most famous works, Animal Farm and 1984, reflect his signature style as well as his two largest preoccupations: his consciousness of social injustice and his opposition to totalitarianism. He is also well known for his interest in the power of language in politics and in shaping how we view the world. He died from tuberculosis at the age of forty-six.

  BOOK 3:

  THE MURDER Of ROGER ACKROYD

  BY AGATHA CHRISTIE

  May 14, 2007

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  What is there not to like about Agatha Christie? Her books are a guilty pleasure; who would have thought that murder could be so delightful? I’ve selected The Murder of Roger Ackroyd for you. Hercule Poirot, the famous Belgian detective, has rather incongruously chosen to retire to the village of King’s Abbot to grow vegetable marrows. But his gardening plans are upset by a shocking murder. Who could have done it? The circumstances are so peculiar.…

  One of the great qualities of Agatha Christie (funny how she’s never referred to simply as “Christie”) is that ambition and talent were perfectly matched. In over eighty novels, she delivered exactly what she promised. To do that in literature requires, I think, not only talent and a sound knowledge of one’s form but also a good degree of self-knowledge. The result, besides a trail of bodies, is an artistic integrity that has endeared her to generations of readers.

  On page 38 I have highlighted a line on George Eliot that I liked: “That pen that George Eliot wrote The Mill on the Floss with—that sort of thing—well, it’s only just a pen after all. If you’re really keen on George Eliot, why not get The Mill on the Floss in a cheap edition and read it?”

  You might have noticed that I have been sending you used books. I have done this not to save money, but to make a point, which is that a used book, unlike a used car, hasn’t lost any of its initial value. A good story rolls off the lot into the hands of its new reader as smoothly as the day it was written.

  And there’s another reason for these used paperbacks that never cost much even when new: I like the idea of holding a book that someone else has held, of eyes running over lines that have already seen the light of other eyes. That, in one image, is the community of readers, is the communion of literature.

  I was in Ottawa recently and while I was there I happened to visit Laurier House, where two of your most illustrious predecessors lived and worked: Wilfrid Laurier and William Lyon Mackenzie King. It’s an impressive mansion, with dark panelling, rich carpets, imposing furniture and a hidden elevator. What a perfect setting for an Agatha Christie murder mystery, I thought, which accounts for the book now in your hands.

  Did you know that both Laurier and King were voracious readers? I include photographs I took of King’s library, which was also where he worked, getting Canada through the Depression and the Second World War and building the foundations of our enviable social welfare system. Remarkable the range and number of books he read, including one that I love, one of the greatest books ever written, Dante’s Divine Comedy. There was the complete Kipling, too, and all of Shakespeare. A two-volume biography of Louis Pasteur. Books on art. Shelf after shelf of the most varied histories and biographies. There were even what looked like self-help books to do with body and health. Truly a striking library. And let’s not forget the piano.

  Laurier, who made a country out of an independent colony, was an even more dedicated reader. His library was so extensive that King had it shipped out when he moved in, needing space for his own collection. Laurier’s books are now stored at the National Archives.

  A part of King’s library.

  How did they manage to read so much? Perhaps Laurier and King were excellent at time management. Certainly television wasn’t there to inform them in part and otherwise fruitlessly devour their hours. Or was it that reading was a natural and essential element of being a respectable, well-rounded gentleman? Was it some ingrained habit of the privileged that gave these two prime ministers permission to spend so much time reading?

  Reading was perhaps a privileged activity then. But not now. In a wealthy, egalitarian country like ours, where the literacy rate is high (although some people still struggle and need our help) and public libraries are just that, public, reading is no longer an elite pastime. A good book today has no class, so to speak, and it can be had by anyone. One of the marvels of where I live, the beautiful province of Saskatchewan, is that the smallest town—Hazlet, for example, population 126—has a public library. Nor need books be expensive, if you want to own one. You can get a gold mine of a used book for fifty cents. After that, all that is needed to appreciate the investment is a little pocket of time.

  And King was a musician, too.

  I bet you King hurried to bed muttering to himself, “It was Parker the butler, I’m sure of it!”

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  DAME AGATHA CHRISTIE 1890–1977, the award-winning British author referred to by some as “the Queen of Crime,” is one of the bestselling authors of all time. She is known the world over for her detective novels and created two of the most iconic detectives in crime-writing history: Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple. She worked as a nurse in World War I, acquiring a knowledge of poisons and illnesses that would later serve her well when writing murder mysteries. In addition to writing more than eighty novels, she wrote several plays, short stories and romances. Many of her stories have been adapted for the screen.

  BOOK 4:

  BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION

  I SAT DOWN AND WEPT

  BY ELIZABETH SMART

  May 28, 2007

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  And now a book to be read aloud. I believe that’s the best way to read Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Because this is a language book, a book where language is the plot, the character and the setting. There is something else, of course, the theme, and the theme here is an old eternal one: love.

  So what a perfect book to read in bed at the end of the day and aloud. A book to be shared.

  The links between art and life can be reductionist, but this might help you stay afloat in the wash of language: one day Elizabeth Smart read some poems in a bookshop and she fell in love—I’m tempted to say “decided to fall in love”—with the poet, who was George Barker. Good thing for George Barker, because I suspect George Barker will be remembered by posterity more for being “the poet Elizabeth Smart fell in love with” than for his poetry. Smart and George Barker eventually met, in California, and they became lovers and her essential bliss and hell began. Because George Barker was married and would have durable relations with more women than just his wife and Elizabeth Smart. The great number of children he fathered—fifteen in all, including four with Smart—might indicate that he took the consequences of love as seriously as its emotional premise, but I doubt his fathering skills were that good. I am digressing. Elizabeth Smart fell in love with George Barker, it was killing for her heart but it yielded this jewel of a book. In a way, Smart was another Dante and By Grand Central Station is another Divine Comedy, only the direction of travel is opposite: she started in heaven and made her way to hell.

  So, layers of allegorical allusions and metaphorical flights, but at the core of this book is the
hard diamond of a passionate love affair.

  I’ll leave the love affair to your own thoughts and conclusions. What can more easily be talked about is the beauty of the language. Language is the crudest form of metaphor. It is a system of refined grunts in which, by common agreement, a sound we make—say “spinach”—is agreed to represent, to mean, that green leafy thing over there that’s good to eat. It makes communicating so much easier and effective, spares one constantly having to point at with bug eyes. I can just see a group of cave people fiercely bobbing their heads up and down and grunting and shouting for joy when they first came upon the idea. It was such a good idea that it spread quickly. What a thrill, involving a fair number of bruising fights, I imagine, it must have been to be the ones who were the first to look upon the world and map it over with words. Different groups of people agreed on different grunts, and that’s all right. Vive la différence.

  And so we have: spinach, épinards, espinacas, spinaci, espinafre, spinat, spenat, pinaatti, szpinak, spenót, , , and we are the better for it. Because these utilitarian grunts unexpectedly became a world unto themselves, offering their own possibilities. We thought language would be a simple tool directly relaying the world to us. But, lo, we found that the tool has become its own world, still relaying the outer world but in a mediated way. Now there is the word and there is the world and the two are enthralled with each other, like two lovers.

  The lovers in the novel were arrested for trying to cross a state border—illicit love being a customs offence at the time—and the first pages of Part Four beautifully capture the coarseness with which the world sometimes greets love.

  I thought I’d quote some passages to show you what powerful stuff you have between your hands, but there are too many—I might as well quote the whole book—and to take them out of context somehow seems offensive.