As the trilogy progressed, a theme that is discussed nowhere in its pages came to the fore: the problem of speaking as a Canadian in the international sphere. The three central characters in Baraka are Americans who met as students at McGill. Their Canadian friend, the dissolute journalist John Field, has lived in Bangkok since his early twenties. Field has a walk-on role in Baraka; is a minor character in The Next Best Thing, where the protagonist is British; and takes the lead in The Paradise Eater, the best of the three novels, which won a literary prize in Italy. The Americans in Baraka never come to life: Saul’s attempts to evoke the Chicago childhood of Laing, the most sympathetic of the group, feel forced. The portrait of Spenser, the British art collector in The Next Best Thing, benefits from Saul’s longer experience of London; like his creator, Spenser has a father who dies of an aneurysm.
The Paradise Eater, in which Field takes the lead, feels like the work of a writer coming to grips with his themes. His groin rotting from venereal diseases acquired in the brothels of Bangkok, Field personifies unconscious Western savagery; the narrator tells us that he has never set foot in the civilizing realm of Europe. The first two novels are about journeys. The Paradise Eater focuses on Bangkok, depicted as a repository of Western decadence. Repeated images of the city threatening to sink beneath flood waters reinforce the theme of moral collapse. Field’s working-class Anglo Montreal background, his friendship with a Québécois UN worker, his father’s fascination with the Rocky Mountains, all ring true. Targeted by murderous drug smugglers, he must finally accept that Bangkok is not his home. The trilogy concludes with him on his way to Calgary, staring at a photograph of his late father standing in the Rockies.
Saul, too, needed to come home. The Field trilogy earned him many readers but denied him the critical respect he sought. His populist attacks, denouncing “highly literate” writers such as John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth as “degenerate,” did not help. As the Cold War wound down, his pose as a colonial adventurer came to seem antiquated, offensive, or faintly ludicrous. A 1986 Globe and Mail profile by Margaret Cannon concluded with the observation that “Saul radiates the imperial insouciance his fictional characters lack. If there’s an outpost to be found, he’ll be there, impeccably dressed and discussing the degenerate West.” A publicity photo for The Paradise Eater showed him in a colonial slouch hat. His uncomprehending evocation of female characters — major plot twists in each of the first two Field novels depend on happily married women impulsively committing adultery — grated on an increasingly feminized culture. Discussing adolescent prostitution in Bangkok with interviewer Nancy Wigston in 1988, Saul echoed a character in The Paradise Eater by stating that “the problem with Western girls is that they don’t have orgasms because they don’t screw young enough.”
It was time for a makeover. When Clarkson’s appointment in Paris ended, the couple moved to Toronto. Saul served as vice-president in 1989–1990 and president from 1990 to 1992 of the Canadian chapter of International PEN. It was the first step in a startlingly successful reinvention of both his writing and his public persona.
t's taken me thirty years to get to what I wrote in A Fair Country," Saul says. It is December 2009, two months after his election as president of International PEN, and the sumptuous 785-seat mainstage of the River Run Centre in Guelph, Ontario, is almost sold out. Saul is giving the annual Guelph Lecture on Being Canadian. Next to him onstage, at his request, stands a chair that holds a portrait of the imprisoned Burmese poet Zargana. Saul’s appearance is sober: a pale blue pinstriped dress shirt open at the neck, a navy blue jacket, and grey slacks that are too long to reveal the colour of his socks. He lectures in a soft voice in which the keening high notes have been muted. When he gestures to emphasize his points, his hands, gyrating palm up and far out to the sides of his body, look as though they are scooping a solid substance out of the air. He knows his script — recasting Canada as “a civilization that looks like a Western civilization but is oral” — by heart, yet he departs from his text to make impassioned asides on issues ranging from the rise in homelessness to the complicity of higher education in weakening Canadian identity: “Universities are the most organized structure we have for training people to think that this country doesn’t exist.”The retooling of Saul’s image, from an elegant throwback of popular fiction to a focused, substantial public intellectual, was achieved in one fell swoop with the publication of Voltaire’s Bastards in 1992. The book’s international success dispatched him on a speaking tour that has continued, more or less unabated, for eighteen years. Appearing in the same year as Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalist tract The End of History and the Last Man, which exulted that with the fall of the Berlin Wall American models would reign supreme forever, Voltaire’s Bastards punctured an unseemly euphoria about Western infallibility. Saul’s 640-page archaeology of the evolution of the Western model is bathed in a scathing skepticism. The core of his argument is that reason, a necessary tool for Enlightenment dissidents such as Voltaire (who were struggling for equality and individual rights against an order characterized by monarchic privileges and ingrained religious dogma), has been transmuted into inflexible management doctrines that are economically wasteful and anti-democratic. The book appealed to the first cohort to feel uneasy about the emerging world of globalization.
Specialists picked holes in the details of his arguments, yet Voltaire’s Bastards, like Jared Diamond’s Collapse, is one of those popular “big think” books that make an impact on public debate despite their inconsistencies. Most important for Saul, the book, which illustrates its points by interweaving American, British, French, and Canadian examples, enabled him to find a voice in which to address international debates from an unselfconsciously Canadian perspective. His later works, which would look both outward to the world and inward to Canada, are a series of refinements of arguments broached in Voltaire’s Bastards. This is most obvious in the 1995 CBC Massey Lectures, The Unconscious Civilization, which extends the Voltairean metaphor by attacking managers as the “courtiers” of the contemporary world; and in the satirical mock encyclopedia The Doubter’s Companion. But it is true even of his engagement in such projects as the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, of which he is co-chair; French for the Future, which he founded in 1997; the short biographies of Penguin Canada’s Extraordinary Canadians series, which he conceived and edits; and the LaFontaine-Baldwin Lectures, which bring together Canadians from both official language groups with aboriginal or foreign intellectuals. What all of these undertakings have in common is the assumption that an informed citizenry is the only defence against an elite estranged from history and the common good by the destructive doctrines of “rational management.”
he strongest evidence of John Saul’s commitment to refashioning his image is his decision to suppress his fifth novel in English. De si bons Américains (Some Good Americans) was published in France in 1994 and reprinted in 2001; it has not appeared anywhere else. Given that his previous novel, The Paradise Eater, appeared in eleven countries and won a major international prize, it seems implausible that he couldn’t find publishers for this book. De si bons Américains is a charming, readable novel-in-stories that might have done credit to W. Somerset Maugham; but, combining social elitism with Third World tourism, it epitomizes the image that had become a burden to Saul. The narrator is a wealthy American based in France, the kind of person who flies from Europe to Mexico for the weekend to attend a high society party. His gossipy tales of his super-rich friends are interspersed with a series of chapters entitled “Conversations with Dictators,” in which the narrator meets Moroccan strongmen, Mauritanian coup plotters, and Haitian dictator Baby Doc Duvalier. The juxtaposition of Western decadence with foreign tyranny comes to a head in the novella-length chapter “A Good American,” in which the narrator is exposed as the core of the problem. In an exclusive London club, he meets a man who tells him that an extended prank the narrator played as a youth drove the man’s father to suicide: “You’re so degenerate, you Americans. Always sermonizing, sermonizing everybody, but you live in a cesspool.”Sentiments such as these, though they go down well in France, risked reviving the criticisms attracted by the Field trilogy and undercutting the weightier reputation Saul was gaining as a cultural critic. The constitutional crises and free trade debates of the late 1980s and early 1990s drew him into Canadian arguments. De si bons Américains was a detour on his road home. During the mid-1990s, as Canadian institutions shuddered before the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Saul wrote Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century, an extended first draft of his vision of the country. In the context of the 1990s, he contended, “rational management” translated into economic continentalism and the warring, equally blinkered compartmentalization of the “Oui” and “Non” sides in the 1995 Quebec referendum, each of which condemned the other’s nation as “not a real country.” Canada, he insisted, had been built on moderation, “complexity,” and social justice achieved by constant communication across lines of cultural difference. This flexible polity, rather than tariff barriers, was what NAFTA was attacking. The treaty’s goal “was not free trade. We already as good as had that. Rather it was the rejection of enforceable social standards in favour of a nineteenth-century — now known as neo-conservative — theory.”
