INTRIGUE, SEX ON THE HILL POLITICS THRILLING? ONLY IN FICTION
Television, novels need to juice the droll reality of life in the capital,
OTTAWA— Political life is not really all that glamorous or thrilling, despite what you may have seen or read over the past month.
So full credit to the people who turned the life of late NDP leader Jack Layton into a TV drama, and to Stephen Maher, the Postmedia reporter who released his self-published political mystery novel, Deadline, last month.
It takes some creativity to inject action and drama into a world that’s mostly about speeches and meetings.
I am left intrigued, though, by the way characters from my world have been portrayed in both creative works, and what that tells us about some differences between political and media people in the current climate.
Jack, for those who didn’t see it, is a dramatized biography of Layton’s life — from his early political battles on Toronto city council to his triumphant “orange crush” in the 2011 election, which installed him as the first NDP politician to lead the official Opposition in Canada.
It is also a love story of Layton’s relationship with Olivia Chow (now the MP for Trinity-Spadina) and a tragedy, of course, because of Layton’s untimely death from cancer so soon after his election victory.
Deadline, meanwhile, was published as an ebook and released last month by a reporter who’s probably better known for his investigative scoops on the so-called “robocalls” controversy of the 2011 election — still being unravelled by police and the courts.
There’s a love story or two in Maher’s book, as well, but with perhaps a little less romance than is seen in the Layton movie.
That’s just one of the many ways in which Deadline presents a somewhat darker picture of political life than the sunny, earnest world of Jack.
THE MOVIE presents the lead character and everyone around him as noble people who do no wrong and have very few doubts about their own motives or deeds.
That’s kind of standard in partisan politics. No matter what goes wrong, no matter how fuzzy or complicated the true story, politicians believe it is their job to present themselves as good and right and always acting with only the best of intentions.
Just this week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper called his embattled former minister, Peter Penashue, the best MP that Labrador has ever had, even as Penashue was resigning under a cloud of scandal over 2011 election expenses. (There’s that 2011 election again, permanently in reruns it seems. Should someone syndicate it for TV?)
In Deadline, we get an entirely different view of the political-human condition. Maher has deliberately cast his characters in shades of black or deep grey. His lead character, Jack Macdonald, is a bit of a sloppy reporter who has trouble keeping his attention focused on one thing for any length of time. The political aides and politicians have hidden agendas piled on hidden agendas; everyone’s loyalty and/or integrity appears to be for sale to the highest bidder.
I liked the book a lot (and you don’t have to be a political junkie to enjoy it), but I asked Maher this week why he’d given readers such a jaundiced view of the characters in our world.
“They’re meant to be sympathetic but are subject to enormous pressures and are forced to make choices that would be hard to justify to someone outside the business,” he said. “I don’t think everyone’s for sale, but I thought it would be interesting to explore the dark side of this town by examining the pressures on the young, ambitious people who come here to make their careers.”
Jack Macdonald was cast as a less-than-stellar reporter, says Maher, because it was simply more interesting than writing about some “superhero” journalist. Maher is interested in power, and what the pursuit of it can make people do. NATURALLY, we expect the makers of fiction and drama (even docu-drama) to use some artistic licence in crafting their characters.
The ways in which Jack and Deadline differ tells us a lot about the ongoing tension — not all of it creative — between politicians and the journalists covering them.
Politicians can’t afford to reveal any doubt or dark moments or questionable intentions. And journalists keep looking for those very things, often to the exclusion of seeing the better side of situations. That’s not new, perhaps, but that’s why we don’t always get along.
In the end, I’d recommend both — with this advisory: politics is neither as unrelentingly nice as Jack nor as dark as Deadline.
The real world of daily life in politics, as it turns out, is devoid of a lot of drama, romance and glamour. But that doesn’t stop us all from looking for it. sdelacourt@thestar.ca