Book Power

It’s Book Week again. The girls dressed up as Tinkerbell (Lara) and a ballerina (Rhea) at school, and had a special parade which they described with excitement (‘Do you know who Karim dressed up as? Miss Strong. He wore red but it wasn’t square.’)

The girls have started to learn to read this year, and I have been listening to children in the girls’ class read to me most weeks, so I’ve been part of this learning for other children too. The children in the class are at wildly different stages: some read few words very haltingly (Level 1), some read short stories fluently (Level 13), but all know their alphabet and have the pre-literacy skills to make progress.

In the adult world of the Writers’ Festival, I went with my friend Kavitha and then with my friend Helen to hear some of our favourite authors. One of the themes of the authors’ talks was the importance of reading to empathise with other people’s lives. In fact Yann Martel said that politicians need to read fiction because it enables them to understand other perspectives which they must do in order to represent their constituents.

Some of the authors talked about receiving letters from readers who described their books as giving them a means of escape from bad things happening in their lives. The children’s writer Leigh Hobbes described how a little boy pulled on his sleeve at a school workshop he had conducted, grilled him on what he knew about a particular type of fighter plane, then dragged him to his locker which was filled with books about the planes – he was quite besotted with them. ‘This kid was just like me when I was five,’ thought the author. He had been obsessed with only two things: drawing and going to London, and these obsessions hadn’t changed during his whole life.

Don Watson talked about the sad state of western politics and society and its complete inability to respond to the challenges of our time. He was rather jaded and didn’t really have solutions to offer for the apathy of our society. He thought people have become exhausted fighting the cultural wars and they seem to have run out of energy to fight against injustices like the plight of refugees.

I am a lot less fired up that I was when I was young, but I don’t know if that’s because of being older, busier or more exhausted with the demands of work and small children. ‘We have no right to be exhausted and apathetic’ said my friend Kavitha, who is a doctor who has worked in Ebola-ridden Africa and seen two-year old orphans die from AIDS after being feared and abandoned by their extended families. ‘We are so lucky in Australia, it’s like paradise.’ I agree with her, but whether I should feel exhausted or not, I do, and maybe others do too.

Or maybe the problems just seem insurmountable. It seems to me that the dangerous lunatic Donald Trump got popular because the American political system has failed so many people, and they feel alienated and let down by the chasm between the American Dream and their insecure, badly-paid, struggling lives, so they make a protest vote for an outsider. How to fix a whole system and society, which contains such powerful interest groups and has such entrenched power systems?

Yann Martel decided to do what he could, using books as his medium. He decided to see if he could broaden the perspectives of the ex-Canadian Prime Minister through books, and he sent Stephen Harper a book every two weeks for four years. First he sent him The Death of Ivan Ilyich (I must read that one). Then he sent his favourite Agatha Cristie, poems, plays and short novels from all over the world.

He didn’t receive any acknowledgement at all. Yann pointed out that by contrast, US President Barack Obama had read Life of Pi with one of his daughters and had enjoyed it, so they had sent him a short note of thanks.

As I have said before, I love reading. I agree with Yann Martel that reading is transformative, and has the power to give insights into very different lives. I agree with him that people in power need to read.

Books are powerful, and I’m looking forward to Rhea and Lara’s lives being further enriched by soon being able to read books of their choosing to themselves.