very year, on the second Sunday after Labour Day, the village of Eden Mills, Ontario, hosts a writers’ festival. Readings take place on lawns and fields next to the sleepy waters of the Eramosa River. The 1,800 paying visitors — readers, writers, people on the fringes of the arts — are a casually dressed, somewhat counterculture bunch. Usually, the only discordant note in this bucolic scene is the uniformed soldiers of the Wellington Rifles Volunteers, who administer parking and first aid. But in 2009, a second anomalous sight appeared, in the shape of a tall man dressed in bright yellow slacks worn high to reveal purple socks. His electric blue dress shirt glaring in the sunlight, John Ralston Saul stood out from both the bohemian crowd ambling down the village’s main street and the soldiers along its edges; yet he is alien to neither. His life bridges Canada’s arts community and its military and government institutions. The distinctive outlook he has developed by spanning these two worlds is central to his vision of culture, industry, and government in Canada and the world, and has inspired a career that, one month later, in October 2009, would see him become the first Canadian to be elected president of International PEN, the organization that campaigns for freedom of speech for writers around the world, and whose past presidents have included such literary heavyweights as John Galsworthy, Arthur Miller, Heinrich Böll, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Saul turns off the main street and walks down a path that leads past the brick-and-clapboard-clad Eden Mills Community Hall into a clearing in the trees. This is the Adisokaun Site, the festival’s most controversial locale. Bypassed by most festival-goers, it was set up in 2002 to offer First Nations writers, storytellers, and drummers a venue in which to show off their talents without being subjected to the demanding selection procedure that determines invitations to the festival. Depending on your point of view, the Adisokaun Site is either a shining example of affirmative action or the artistic equivalent of an Indian reservation. In recent years, two First Nations writers have complained of being denied access to the festival’s mainstream audience after being obliged to read in the woods. On the strength of his book A Fair Country, which argues that aboriginal heritage has a significant influence on daily life in Canada, Saul has become the first non-native writer to be invited to the site. (Unlike most First Nations writers, however, Saul will also read later in the day, at a mainstream festival location.) His appearance at the Adisokaun Site is announced as a dialogue, but the conversation doesn’t go well. His host, an aboriginal comic and writer named Drew Hayden Taylor, reels out corny one-liners that deflate Saul’s points before he can develop them. The crowd, uneasy about trespassing on “native land,” hangs back on the edge of the clearing. Finally, Saul interrupts his host to invite everyone to come closer. He asks those who have brought deck chairs to move them to the front of the clearing. His voice is both authoritative and peevish. He waves his hands, urging Canadians from disparate backgrounds to come together, because he has something important to tell them.

n John Ralston Saul’s confidence that he can speak to all Canadians lies the core of his public personality. It’s also why we find him unnerving, and why media coverage of the man displays scorn as often as it does admiration. His emergence as the most articulate public custodian of national values our leaders seem to disdain has done little to alleviate this uneasiness. Most Canadians identify fiercely with their region, yet find the idea of Canada elusively abstract. Many of us feel secretly guilty about responding to other regions with stereotypes or resentments — at not being better coast-to-coast-to-coast Canadians. Saul aggravates this subliminal guilt because he has no obvious regional identification and has an apparently effortless relationship with the nation called Canada. If we feel reprimanded by Saul’s existence, if he appears to glide through an ether that floats slightly above the plane of daily life, this may be the reason. In social situations, Canadians place one another by region in the way that Americans define new acquaintances by where they went to college. Once you learn that the other person is an Albertan, a Québécois, a Newfoundlander, you know who you’re dealing with; a Canadian who lacks a regional identification elicits feelings of mistrust. Yet that is Saul’s heritage.

The Armed Forces, as Prime Minister Stephen Harper recognized in placing them at the centre of the Conservatives’ vision of Canadian identity, constitute one of our few authentically national institutions. Saul was born into a military family in 1947. His father, Colonel William Saul, was a first-generation soldier; his mother’s family had a long tradition of military service. Saul’s older brother, who married an Englishwoman, served as an officer in the British Army. From the beginning, Saul’s life took place in a national context. Born in Ottawa, he was christened in Calgary. He spent his infancy in Alberta and much of his childhood in Manitoba, and graduated from high school in Oakville, Ontario. As a young man, he became fluent in French. By the time he started university at McGill, his father was working in Paris and Brussels as a military adviser to the Canadian ambassador to NATO. John was accepted into the foreign service and appeared destined for a life of diligent diplomacy. But William Saul’s sudden death from an aneurysm in 1968 — he was forty-nine — changed his son’s plans. Turning down the foreign service, John left Montreal to attend graduate school at King’s College, London. His doctoral research took him to Paris, where his career as a writer began.

It is fascinating to speculate that the death of his father released John Saul from establishment conformism, although his writing, as though in homage to his parents, has championed their world: a national vision of Canada supplemented by the insights offered by Parisian and French culture. Yet the self-confident spokesman on Canadian identity and international politics did not emerge naturally from Saul’s public service background. Military officers implement policies; they don’t analyze or reimagine them. If they criticize governments, their criticisms are judiciously phrased and for internal consumption only. To become a provocative public intellectual, and in particular a self-defined Canadian public intellectual, Saul had to undertake a lengthy process of self-reconstruction.

After settling in France, where he supported himself by running the French subsidiary of a British investment company, he also had to find his way home. In Europe, he came to resemble Mavis Gallant’s characterization of Canadians who, after years abroad, can no longer admit who they are: “Sometimes they try to pass for British, not too successfully, or for someone vaguely chic and transatlantic. I have wondered, but not wanted to ask, how they replace the national sense of self.” In Saul’s case, the national sense of self was displaced by a voracious expertise on French politics. His doctoral thesis, “The Evolution of Civil-Military Relations in France after the Algerian War,” received a chilly reception from the examiners at King’s College, effectively ruling out an academic career and adding a new layer to his personality: a disdain of “mediocre frightened academics.” The 653-page thesis — which examined the death of French president Charles de Gaulle’s chief of staff, General Charles Ailleret, in a plane crash in 1968 — plumbed the inner workings of the French bureaucracy. Determined to publicize his theory that Ailleret had been assassinated, Saul rewrote his research as a novel.

Published in French in 1977 as Mort d’un général, with the names of the historical figures changed, and later in English as The Birds of Prey, with the names restored, the novel rode the coattails of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, one of the biggest bestsellers of the 1970s, which dramatized an assassination attempt on de Gaulle himself. A spare, almost emotionless novel that reads as though it had been translated from the French, The Birds of Prey sold over a million copies. The dedication — “to / Charles de Gaulle / from a disciple / Sans peur / et / Sans regret” — stakes out Saul’s position as an opponent of the young leftists who supported the May 1968 Paris student revolts de Gaulle suppressed. The novel’s opening pages ridicule the stock figure of “a young American student, apparently unclean, leafing through pages of defunct socialist monthlies.” It is instructive to find the criticisms of bureaucrats and courtiers in Voltaire’s Bastards and The Unconscious Civilization foreshadowed by the conspirators in The Birds of Prey; but it is startling to glimpse Saul’s later Canadian nationalism, often characterized by his critics as left wing, being nourished by de Gaulle’s centralization of the Fifth Republic.

The Birds of Prey exposes a personal identity crisis. The protagonist, Charles Stone, is a cipher: an aimless, independently wealthy, bilingual young anglophone living in Paris. He carries an Irish passport but is not Irish. He seems to be one of Gallant’s Canadians, trying to pass “for someone vaguely chic and transatlantic.” Stone is the creation of a writer who is trying to work out how to forge a public personality from a surface of urbane ambiguity. The description of the protagonist could apply to his creator: “Stone was a tall man…His strength was deceivingly hidden because his lines were smooth and clean as if he were slight. His character appeared in the same way, deceptively hiding in its own good balance.”

By the time The Birds of Prey was published, Saul had returned to Canada. David Mitchell, a banker who had taught him in a management seminar in New York, mentioned his name to Canadian businessman and United Nations official Maurice Strong. In 1976, when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau appointed Strong to found Petro-Canada, Saul became the new director’s executive assistant. Strong later characterized Saul as “an invaluable, though unconventional, member of my personal staff.” Saul’s readjustment to Canada after seven years in London and Paris was not easy. As Strong recalled, “At times he caused me some problems with other members of our growing team, whose toes he frequently stepped on. His manner and lifestyle were those of a cultured aristocrat, which made him something of an eccentric in Calgary. He soon became known in the local restaurants for his fastidious taste, which few if any of Calgary’s establishments were able to satisfy.”

Between 1976 and 1978, while working in the oil business, Saul began to travel widely. He also met Adrienne Clarkson. The latter event facilitated the former: by entering into a life partnership with a woman who was an established public personality and eight years his senior — he was twenty-nine, she thirty-seven with children from her first marriage — he confirmed that his life would be devoted to the pursuit of career rather than to founding a family. As John Lownsbrough wrote of the couple in 1994, “Each seems to understand and encourage the other’s need for independent travel.”