Reading Michael Ignatieff
He's famous for his non-fiction, but this novels tell a different story
Daniel Tencer
One of the most overlooked aspects of interim Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff's carefully cultivated image of Renaissance man — teacher, TV personality, philosopher, and now politician — is that this polymath is, on top of all else, a novelist. It is rare that a creative writer comes within a single confidence vote of leading a Western country; for the closest precedent, we'd have to reach back to the poet V‡clav Havel, who became president of Czechoslovakia in the wake of the 1989 Velvet Revolution.
Ignatieff, by comparison, is no revolutionary. His three novels — Asya, Scar Tissue, and Charlie Johnson in the Flames — are wellcrafted, mature, and occasionally endowed with moments of brilliance and passion. They also hold clues about Ignatieff's emotional life, his aesthetic, and his ability to empathize, and thus provide unique insight into the sort of prime minister he could one day become. The first two novels offer the best insight.
His first novel, Asya (1991), takes to heart the clichˇd adage "Write what you know." Ignatieff does, and what comes out is the story of Princess Asya Galitzine, a Russian aristocrat who sees her family destroyed by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution and spends her adulthood in exile, coming to terms with the betrayals and delusions of those around her.
The book is clearly an attempt by Ignatieff to come to terms with his own heritage; it's also his attempt at a grand Russian novel, complete with long aristocratic names and melodramatic, irony-free emotional gestures.
There is something unseemly about a politician who sympathizes more with the woes of a dying feudal aristocracy than with the populace that that aristocracy oppressed for centuries. This may be an unavoidable result of Ignatieff's own history — he is the grandson of Count Paul Ignatieff, education minister to Czar Nicholas II. Yet Asya does little to dispel the image, currently being cultivated by Ignatieff's political enemies, that he is a stuffy aristocrat out of touch with plebeian reality.
If Asya is Ignatieff's reconciliation with his past, then Scar Tissue (1993), his second novel, is his reconciliation with his future — namely, death.
An intense and often morose novel that was short-listed for the Booker Prize, Scar Tissue is the most autobiographical of Ignatieff's writings. Like Ignatieff himself, the protagonist is an introspective RussianCanadian academic who lives through his mother's losing battle with Alzheimer's. Scar Tissue refl ects a surprising empathy: large tracts of the novel are devoted to imagining what it must be like to be the protagonist's mother, struggling to maintain sovereignty over her mind and body. The book suggests that a Prime Minister Ignatieff may be far more compassionate and grounded than the man's lofty speeches and chin-held-high demeanour would suggest. If Asya refl ects Ignatieff's weaknesses as a politician, Scar Tissue reveals his strengths.
The book's most memorable moment comes in its final pages, when the protagonist imagines his own descent into the nightmare of Alzheimer's, waking in the middle of the night in a panic, unable to remember where or who he is. This visceral first-person description of mental degeneration haunts the reader long after the book is finished, but it also poses uncomfortable questions about Ignatieff the politician. A person capable of facing such difficult realities directly may prove to be a capable and compassionate leader, but such sang-froid could just as easily indicate a leader more comfortable with realpolitik, or deceit, or war. Ignatieff's political writings show he does not shy away from international confrontation in the name of high ideals; Scar Tissue shows he has the temperament to carry out his beliefs.
The good news about Ignatieff's novels is that they confirm that he is one of those rare individuals who is talented and successful in many directions. If he brought the same kind of discipline to Ottawa as he has to the written word, Ignatieff's chances of making a positive mark as a prime minister would be high. But that is a big if, and the one thing we can be sure of about Ignatieff as a leader is this: Regardless of how his time at the head of government were to turn out, the book he would write afterward would surely be brilliant.
