Talking to the Governor General’s husband

These are the questions I did not ask John Ralston Saul during our interview last week:

• How does it feel to be travelling as yourself, a prize-winning author, rather than as the spouse of the GG?
• Is there a guardian Mountie lurking on the edges of the book tour?
• Have you tired of the life of pomp and ceremony?

Instead, we stick to the script during our telephone conversation. I’m grateful that his publicists have managed to gouge 25 minutes out of Saul’s jam-packed schedule, the day before he gives his lecture in Victoria, part of his nine-city Canadian tour to promote his newest book, The Collapse of Globalism, released in May by Viking Canada.

Aside from the fact that the hotel receptionist initially cannot find his name (he’s under Ralston Saul) on the guest roster, it’s surprisingly easy to reach the author in the Hotel Macdonald in Edmonton. I imagine his setting: the elegantly refurbished old hotel overlooks the North Saskatchewan River Valley, one of the prime sites in the city. My call interrupts a late-afternoon snack, and he answers the phone in mid-munch, apologizing.

Has he got a room with a view? “Absolutely,” Saul replies.

“I always ask for a river view,” he says, adding that the grandeur of the river valleys in Edmonton and Saskatoon always “bowl over” foreign visitors, who don’t expect such vistas in urban settings.

Renowned for such earlier works as his philosophical trilogy – Voltaire’s Bastards, The Doubter’s Companion and The Unconscious Civilization (which won a Governor General’s award in 1996) -- The Collapse of Globalism seems a logical sequel to Saul’s other non-fiction books, On Equilibrium and Canada: Reflections of a Siamese Twin. In the face of his non-fiction celebrity, it’s easy to forget Saul is also the author of five novels, all of them exploring the collision between power and responsibility.

For many years now, John Ralston Saul has been variously described as a literary gadfly and as one of Canada’s best known public intellectuals. I’d put him firmly in the latter camp, and so do many others, including TC readers who have e-mailed me to say so.

I’d just finished reading The Collapse of Globalism the night before our interview and liked it immensely. Its argument is cogent, but I’ve been an anti-globalist from Day 1, so mine might be an assessment from the already convinced. The book’s subtitle is And the Reinvention of the World, so it is more heartening than you’d expect of a book about economics. Saul suggests we are entering a new era when factors other than the bottom line might operate as suitable gauges of human existence. He says our options now include both “negative” and “positive” nationalism. The latter, Saul writes, will allow citizens once again to have a hand in the decisions affecting their own lives.

As you might expect from a man with a PhD from the University of London, The Collapse of Globalism’s argument is well buttressed by wide-ranging citation. And it's delightfully witty. One of my favourite passages comes in Chapter 25, when Saul writes: “The least expected and most obvious manifestation of negative nationalism has been God’s willingness to make regular appearances on the side of various participants in these new civilizational clashes. This return of the deity surely cannot have been intended by the believers in Globalism. Whether intended or not, God is clearly back in his old public, but non-religious, role, as a political sidekick, ready to justify whatever is required.”

Wowie-zowie: Zap! to all denominations of fundamentalism now free-booting through political corridors worldwide.

“I'm glad you found it funny,” Saul responds. “We’re so used to any economic question being deadly serious . . . yet how can it be allowed to escape the human use of irony and tragedy?”

And how is the nine-city Canadian book tour going?

“I’m used to tours that are a little bit different,” he says, ever the master of understatement. “But I am enjoying the community engagement and the audience response. In Calgary I spoke to about 750 people who have very different experiences in life and politics, and they are all worrying about what's going on. As I say in the book, it's a confused period, and that can be dangerous, but it can also be a period of opportunity.”

Saul says people coming to hear him are eager to “think in public” and to discuss the issues affecting their public and private lives, which globalism certainly has.

“One of the things I’ve loved about going across the country is hearing the questions people have,” he notes, adding that even keen civil libertarians in places like Alberta are ready -- in the aftermath of such shocks as Mad Cow Disease and the slamming shut of American markets -- to redesign how the marketplace should operate.

Furthermore, Saul says, it’s quite possible that British Columbia might be the “cauldron of new ideas that could work for the rest of the country.”
As a result of the conversations he’s been having with his audience, Saul says, “Already I could write another chapter at the end of the book about what people are thinking.”

Saul unleashes a torrent of ideas when I ask about the recent European Union vote in France and the Netherlands. “The elite said, ‘We know what to do,' but the people did not know what they were getting and what they were losing (in the referendum),” he says. When they got no helpful answers from their leaders, “they got mad,” and voted no to economic union.

“One of the great errors of a universal truth -- of which there aren’t any -- is to say ‘Don’t worry, you don’t have much power, leave it to us.’ This undercuts the idea of democracy and citizenship.”

Citing such countries as China, India and Brazil, which, despite their many internal problems, are working to find ways to forge their own economic path, independent of Western dictates, Saul envisions a new economic era. And he hopes that local and municipal politics will once again engage people and “shake the defeatist approach.”

When I bring up the role of public intellectual, Saul responds obliquely. “I always describe myself as a novelist and essayist,” he says. “Other people call me other things -- some of them nice and some of them not -- but they will do that. I’m always saying that the role of a writer is to act in some way as a mirror to the public, and to turn that into language. Our job is not sitting apart from the population.”

But then, citizens who have already attended one of Saul’s lectures know that. For the rest, The Collapse of Globalism remains a fine site of engagement.