27 Sep Sedated and body-snatched

You have to wonder who in Michael Ignatieff’s camp thinks it’s smart for him to keep giving long form interviews to plummy foreign journals. First it was the New Yorker, now it’s The Guardian, a left-of-centre daily in Britain, where Iggy hosted a BBC-TV arts program for six years.

Interviewer Rachel Cooke is a tad shaky on Canadian politics—she calls Ignatieff “the man most likely to be Canada’s next prime minister,” and describes the Harper government as “on its knees”—but she does get off a few delicious zingers.

On his return to Canada:

[H]e likes to attribute his return at least as much to homesickness as to pragmatism. Honestly! It wasn’t like he disliked Canada, or anything, for all that he chose to live elsewhere, and for so long. He missed the place: the cold, the skating rinks, the desperate need for mittens in winter.

On his new book:

This is what has had [critics] holding their noses. Now that he is a politician, they say, it’s hard to see True Patriot Love as anything other than a grotesquely over-blown campaign leaflet. Ignatieff, who has the aloof manner and the half-closed, upwardly-tilting eyes of a pedigree cat, looks at me more in sorrow than in anger when I bring this up. It is so very… painful because, after all, he was a writer long before he was a politician.

On his manner:

His tone, as he tells me this, is slow, excessively careful, and completely without irony, none of which would be surprising were he a career politician. Since when did irony and politics go? But Ignatieff used to be a writer. Listening to him now, it’s as if he’s been sedated, or body-snatched, or something. He’s like a jazz man who’s lost his sense of rhythm…

[E]verything I know about Canada has been gleaned from the stories of Alice Munro, and the novels of Carol Shields. Ignatieff nods approvingly at this: “Good for you!” he says, in the manner of a kindly don to a kid from a council estate.

On his Iraq War cock-up:

[I]n Canada, his former support for Bush continues to hang over him, like a cloud of midges.

Cooke gets a few interesting quotes out of Iggy, too:

Going to meet the president of the United States is a big deal. You do get, erm, a little apprehensive. But he is a master political animal. Grips you by the elbow, tells you that he’s read your books, sits you down, makes you feel like you’re the only guy in the world. Thirty-five minutes later, you think: that was a great guy. But you don’t feel surreal. You feel you’re sitting down with an extremely intelligent, good listener who’s locked right in. A month into his presidency, and he conveyed the impression that he’s always been president. That was genuinely astounding. He was at ease in some amazing way.

“I married the right woman,” he says. “That has turned out to be the most important single fact. I’m not going to die out there if people don’t like me because there’s someone at home who thinks I’m OK.”

Hat tip: A.N.