101 Letters to a Prime Minister

by Yann Martel

  SARAH L. THOMSON was formerly a senior editor at HarperCollins Children’s Books. After publishing her first book, The Dragon’s Son, she resigned from her editorial position in order to pursue writing full-time. To date she has written twenty children’s titles and won several awards, including the 2005 Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Gold Seal Award for Amazing Tigers! and a Bank Street College of Education Best Book of the Year award for Amazing Gorillas!

  ROB GONSALVES (b. 1959) is a Canadian painter whose style is described as both surrealist and magical realist. His art is characterized by fantastical and detailed optical illusions, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. He has worked as an architect, muralist and theatre painter, experiences that are reflected in his paintings of buildings and landscapes. Though he is not primarily a children’s illustrator, he has worked on the children’s books Imagine a Day, Imagine a Night and Imagine a Place.

  CHRIS VAN ALLSBURG (b. 1949) is an American author and illustrator of children’s books, most notably Jumanji and The Polar Express. His fantastical stories are set in incredible places and feature magical, dangerous or mysterious objects. Van Allsburg is known for exploring themes in his stories that are darker than those usually associated with children’s literature. He has also collaborated as an illustrator with other authors, including illustrated editions of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. He has won the Caldecott Honor Medal several times.

  BOOK 20:

  THE EDUCATED IMAGINATION

  BY NORTHROP FRYE

  January 7, 2008

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  A book that defends the essential,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  I hope you and your family had a good Christmas and that you are returning to work with your mind and heart refreshed. I suspect 2008 will be a busy year for us. I have a book to finish and you have a government to run. We both hope to get good reviews for our respective labours.

  I was in Moncton in late November last year, doing a series of special events organized by the Northrop Frye Literary Festival, which runs every year in April. Someone asked me, in a lovely Acadian accent, “As-tu lu The Educated Imagination de Northrop Frye?” (“Have you read …”)

  I hadn’t read Frye’s The Educated Imagination. Or anything else by him. Northrop Frye—and I’m educating myself as I tell you what follows, catching up—lived between 1912 and 1991, spending his early formative years in Moncton (hence the name of the festival) and most of his adult years at the University of Toronto, where he was a great light. Frye was a world-class literary critic who wrote such books as Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, Anatomy of Criticism and The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. He led a thrilling life of the mind, most of it fed by literature, and he gave much to his students and readers. He was a great thinker, teacher, Canadian.

  I should explain why I have never until now read Frye. It wasn’t intellectual sloth. It was rather a conscious decision. Frye, as I’ve just said, was a literary critic. He looked at literature, he looked through literature, seeing in it recurring symbols, underlying structures, overarching metaphors. All of which is no doubt fascinating—but not to the young man I was when I started writing. Self-knowledge is often a good thing—it teaches you your limits—but too much of it too soon can ruin the incipient artist in you if it gives you the sense that you have no original core, that you are just dough in a pre-established mould. Then, as now, I just wanted to write, to create, to invent. I wasn’t interested in being told what I was doing, whom I was repeating, what convention I was adhering to. Why become self-conscious if it meant I wouldn’t dare to write? So I avoided literary criticism, those words and books that might snuff out my wavering creative flame. Trope was tripe to me.

  However, right after being asked the question by the person with the lovely Acadian accent, I was presented by her with the book in question, Northrop Frye’s The Educated Imagination. She thought of it because of the small book club you and I have going. She wondered if you might not enjoy it (you may be interested to know that I get suggestions of books to send you all the time). I felt it would be rude not to read so considerate a gift. And surely, with three books completed and a fourth one nearly done, I could withstand a literary critic suddenly turning a mirror on me.

  Well, I’m happy to report that I read the book and I’m still standing. The Educated Imagination was interesting to me, and I think it might be even more interesting to you. Frye, in this short, oral book—he delivered it in six parts as the 1962 Massey Lectures—speaks about the role of literature in education and society, about whether the first is needed by the other two.

  It certainly is needed, Frye argues persuasively. It all comes down to language and the imagination. Frye explains that no matter what use we are making of language, whether it’s for practical self-expression, to convey information or self-consciously to be creative, we must use our imagination. As he puts it: “Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination. But we use our imagination all the time: it comes into all our conversation and practical life: it even produces dreams when we’re asleep. Consequently we have only the choice between a badly trained imagination and a well-trained one, whether we ever read a poem or not.” Imagination is not just for writers. It’s for everyone. At another point, Frye says, “The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life … is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.” This statement has obvious political implications. You see why I said this book might be of interest to you.

  One of the classic dualities of existence is that of the head and the heart, of thinking and feeling, of reason and emotion. It’s not untrue, but I do wonder how useful this division is. One might suppose that a mathematician hard at work is being entirely reasonable while someone crying at the scene of a terrible accident is being entirely emotional, but otherwise can we so clearly delineate between the two? Frye believed that these are rather different ways of using one’s imagination, that the imagination underpins them both. And the better, the more fertile our imagination, the better we can be at being both reasonable and emotional. As broad and deep as our dreams are, so can our realities become. And there’s no better way to train that vital part of us than through literature.

  The imagination, then, is where is all starts, both for you and for me.

  Happy New Year.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  NORTHROP FRYE (1912–1991) was one of Canada’s most respected literary critics and theorists. He gained international notoriety for his first book, Fearful Symmetry, and continued to establish his reputation with Anatomy of Criticism and The Stubborn Structure. Frye was a member of the Royal Society of Canada and a Companion of the Order of Canada. During his lifetime, he won several awards including the Lorne Pierce Medal, the Pierre Chauveau Medal and the Governor General’s Literary Award. Apart from his significant contributions to Canadian literature, his name is also a frequent crossword puzzle clue and he is honoured each year at a literary festival in Moncton.

  BOOK 21:

  THE CELLIST OF SARAJEVO

  BY STEVEN GALLOWAY

  January 21, 2008

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  A whole-person work,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  You may have asked yourself on occasion what process I go through to select the books I have been sending you. Why don’t I answer that question in this letter.

  Any book adheres to one convention or another—be it that of the Novel or the Biography—and all sentences are either conventionally grammatical or conventionally ungrammatical. It’s the rare, very rare wri
ter who is genuinely unconventional, and usually their revolution is at one level only, affecting, say, point-of-view, while following the herd when it comes to punctuation. A writer who is unconventional on too many levels runs the risk of losing the reader, who can’t manage to get a solid footing on so much new territory and gives up the effort. Finnegans Wake, by the Irish writer James Joyce, is an example of such arduous total newness.

  A book is a convention, then, as are the categories of thinking that produce books: Art, History, Geography, Science, and so on. That’s how we like it, we humans. We like orderly sentences and orderly books in much the same way we like orderly streets and orderly governments. Which is not to say that we are not bold creatures. We are; in fact, there is no bolder creature on Earth. To give you a non-literary example: in the late 1960s, the Americans marshalled together the conventions of science, engineering, management and financing, and as a result achieved the highly unconventional goal of popping two of their citizens onto the Moon.

  Back to books. They are products of convention, but there are many conventions. I mentioned two already, the Novel and the Biography, which flow from two other conventions, Fiction and Non-fiction. Within each, there are sub-conventions, categories, genres. I have tended to send you books of fiction rather than non-fiction because fiction is a more worked-through interpretation of life. What do I mean by that? I mean that fiction is both more personal and more synthesized than non-fiction. Fiction is more whole-person. A novel is about Life itself, whereas a history remains about a specific instance of Life. A great Russian novel—remember the Tolstoy I sent you—will always have a more universal resonance than a great history of Russia; you will think of the first as being about you on some level, whereas the second is about someone else.

  So that’s the first rule: a work of fiction. Now, there are many kinds of fictions. There is the literary novel, the thriller, the murder mystery, the satire, and so on. As you haven’t yet communicated to me your literary interests, and since it’s not for me to judge what you should read, I have not excluded any genre. Whatever book I send you must only be good; that is, once you’ve read it, you must feel wiser, or at least more knowledgeable. Or to put it another way, as I did many months ago, it must increase your sense of stillness.

  The other considerations are simple:

  1) I send you short books, generally under two hundred pages. You are probably busier than most people, and you probably feel that you are more importantly busy. I believe that’s an illusion. As a friend once told me, the only thing that will really go down in history is how we raise our children. The life of the Canadian people is determined and built by each and every Canadian, one small act at a time. There are twenty-four hours in a day and each one of us chooses how to fill those hours. No one’s hour is more important than anyone else’s. Nonetheless, it’s harder to follow an eight-hundred-page tome in fifteen-minute snatches than it is a slim novel.

  2) For the same reason that you likely don’t give yourself stretches of hours in which to wrap your mind around a convoluted story, I send you books that speak plainly.

  3) I send you books that are varied, that will show you all that the word can do. At the rate of one book every two weeks, this is a harder requirement to satisfy. There are so many good books out there, Mr. Harper. But I must pace myself. I am starting with older books, aiming to be foundational, and from there I will build up to books from our comparatively young nations of Canada and Quebec.

  Within those broad criteria, I choose the books I send you in a spontaneous, nearly random way, just whatever strikes me as possibly of interest to you. I also listen to the suggestions of others, as I did two weeks ago with Frye’s The Educated Imagination. (Did you enjoy it, by the way?)

  But some rules are meant to be broken, and this week’s book is an example of that. Steven Galloway’s novel The Cellist of Sarajevo speaks plainly, but it’s a little too long by our criteria (fifty-eight pages over the limit), it’s Canadian and it’s so recent that it qualifies as prenatal: it hasn’t even been published yet. It’s supposed to come out in April of this year. The unadorned paperback you have in your hands is what publishers call an advance reading copy. It’s sent out to booksellers, journalists and book clubs to drum up interest and excitement in a book prior to its publication—sort of like politicians doing the summer barbecue circuit before an election. The general reading public does not normally see an advance reading copy. What you are holding in your hands is a rare item.

  And it’s also a grand and powerful novel about how people retain or reclaim their humanity when they are under extreme duress. I’m sure you will hear about The Cellist of Sarajevo from other people than just me. It’s set during the brutal siege of the Bosnian city of Sarajevo in the early 1990s. That story was in the news for years, yet I think most of us just took it in dumbly, wondering how people could do that to each other. Well, Galloway’s novel explains how. It does the work of a good fiction: it transports you to a situation that might be alien to you, makes it familiar, and so brings understanding. That’s what I meant when I said fiction is “whole-person.” While reading The Cellist of Sarajevo you are imaginatively there, in Sarajevo, as the mortar shells are falling and snipers are seeking to kill you as you cross a street. Your mind’s eye sees, your moral sense is outraged: your full humanity is being exercised.

  Yet The Cellist is a directed and digested take on reality, it’s not journalism. There is subtle intent woven into the realistic narrative of its three main characters. You will see that when you read the last line of the novel, which is magnificent.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  STEVEN GALLOWAY (b. 1975) is a Canadian novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Besides The Cellist of Sarajevo, he has written the novels Finnie Walsh and Ascension. Galloway teaches creative writing at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia.

  BOOK 22:

  MEDITATIONS

  BY MARCUS AURELIUS

  Translated from the Greek by Maxwell Staniforth

  February 4, 2008

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  A book from a fellow head of government,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  Like you, Marcus Aurelius was a head of government. In AD 161, he became Emperor of Rome, the last of the “five good emperors”—Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius—who ruled over an eighty-four-year period of peace and prosperity that lasted from AD 96 to 180, the Roman Empire’s golden apogee.

  The case of Rome is worth studying. How a small town on a river became the centre of one of the mightiest empires the world has known, eventually dominating thousands of other small towns on rivers, is a source of many lessons. That Rome was mighty is not to be doubted. The sheer size the empire achieved is breathtaking: from the Firth of Forth to the Euphrates, from the Tagus to the Rhine, spilling over into Northern Africa, for a time the Romans ruled over most of the world known to them. What they didn’t rule over wasn’t worth having, they felt: they left what was beyond their frontiers to “barbarians.”

  Another measure of their greatness can be found in the Roman influences that continue to be felt to this day. Rome’s local lingo, Latin, became the mother language of most of Europe, and Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese are still spoken all over the world. (The Germanic hordes beyond the Rhine, meanwhile, have managed to sponsor only one international language, albeit a successful one, English.) We also owe the Romans our calendar, with its twelve months and 365-and-a-quarter-day years; three days in our week hark back to three Roman days—Moonday, Saturnday and Sunday; and though we now use the Roman number system (i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi …) only occasionally, we use their 26-letter alphabet constantly.

  Despite their power and might, another lesson about the Roman Empire forces itself
upon us: how it’s all gone. The Romans reigned far and wide for centuries but now their empire has vanished entirely. A Roman today is simply someone who lives in Rome, a city that is beautiful because of its clutter of ruins. Such has been the fate of all empires: the Roman, the Ottoman, the British, the Soviet, to name only a few European empires. Which will be the next empire to fall, the next to rise?

  The interest in reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, the book I am sending you this time, lies as much in their content as in the knowledge of who wrote them. European history has got us used to seeing one monarch after another reach the throne for no reason other than direct filial relation, with talent and ability playing no role. Thus the unending line of mediocre personalities—to put it charitably—who came to rule and mismanage so many European nations. This was not Marcus Aurelius’s route to power. Although he inherited the throne from Emperor Antoninus Pius, he was not Pius’s biological son.

  Nor was he elected. He was rather selected. Roman emperors did pass on their emperorship to their sons, but this linkage was rarely directly biological. They instead designated their successors by a system that was authoritarian yet flexible: adoption. Marcus Aurelius became emperor as a result of being adopted by the reigning emperor. Each emperor chose whom he wanted as his successor from among the many capable and competing members of Rome’s diverse elite class. Members of that class were often related, but they still had to prove themselves if they wanted to move up in the world.