What Stephen Harper
isn’t reading

Yann Martel tries (unsuccessfully) to coax the Prime Minister out of his literary comfort zone

by JULIET WATERS

On April 16, 2007, Yann Martel launched a personal guerrilla campaign to discover what, if any, literature Stephen Harper reads. Every two weeks, the author of the international bestseller Life of Pi sent Harper a book and a thoughtful letter explaining his choice.

Martel’s chosen authors ranged from Agatha Christie to George Orwell, from Michael Ignatieff to Laura and Jenna Bush, from Art Spiegelman to Chester Brown. The goal of the campaign wasn’t to humiliate Harper, but to see if it was possible to engage the Prime Minister in any kind of dialogue on the subject of literature.

It wasn’t. The campaign continues (whatisstephenharperreading.ca), and in over two years, the Prime Minister has never personally replied. This despite the fact that Canada will gain a nice chunk of taxes this year from the advance Martel has been given for his next novel (rumoured by the New York Times to be around $3-million). I Skyped with Martel in Saskatoon last week to find out if there’s been any progress since the release of What Is Stephen Harper Reading?, the charming book that has come out of this quirky, if doomed, project.

Mirror: So what have reactions been?

Yann Martel: Interestingly mixed. Some people think that it’s completely irrelevant what he reads and that it’s entirely in the domain of his private affairs, which doesn’t make sense. If a politician admitted that his favourite book was Mein Kampf, we’d obviously not vote for him…But my theory is that Harper is post-literate [i.e he gets his knowledge from sources other than literature]. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. He could have an innate sense of wisdom, an innate sense of empathy, but my theory, my belief—maybe it’s naïve—but in some ways, literature opens doors.

Literature opens your heart, makes you more empathetic. You read a story about a boy soldier in Afghanistan and it opens your heart, even if you’ve never been to Afghanistan. So when you read books, it’s like travelling, and I get the sense that Harper has, for whatever reason, not chosen to travel in that way.

M: What bothers me more than the possibility that he doesn’t read is that he doesn’t care. And that he doesn’t get that there is a Canadian writer with your level of international success taking his heartfelt time to do this, with such obvious sincerity, and he can’t manage a reply.

YM: You know, I think the reason he hasn’t responded is because in some way I caught him out. I’ve noticed that people who are ambitious and highly accomplished, it’s rare that they will candidly admit that they never read. To say no, I haven’t read a novel since I was 18, since I was told to in high school. To say, I don’t read any fiction, feels for these people like some kind of limitation, which is why I think he’s never answered. Because, he does answer. When I was in Montreal a couple of weeks ago, I did an interview on the radio and the host told me, “You know what, Chantal Hébert—the journalist—sent Stephen Harper a book called Fearful Symmetry: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Founding Values by Brian Lee Crowley. And Harper wrote back to her and said: thank you for the book and I READ IT!” [Martel’s emphasis]

M: Really, wow.

YM: So, this spoke to him, you know Canada’s founding values, it must be a mixture of politics, economics and philosophy. [According to Amazon.ca, it’s a book about how we went from a nation of “makers” to a nation of “takers,” the “takers” being anyone who has ever “relied on the state for support.”] Harper said—which is kind of a funny thing to say—“and I read it.” So clearly that’s in his comfort zone, but Agatha Christie, all the other books I’ve sent him, are not in his comfort zone, so he hasn’t replied.

WHAT IS STEPHEN HARPER READING?
BY YANN MARTEL, VINTAGE, PB,
233 PP., $21
MARTEL READS AT PARAGRAPHE
(2220 MCGILL COLLEGE) ON WEDNESDAY,
NOV. 18, 6:30 P.M.