War and Peace a great lesson for contemporary leaders

The story goes that when John Howard was limbering up for the prime ministership, Barry Jones, that polymath Labor man, came to him bearing a copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

“Why are you giving me this?” Howard asked.

“Because if you become prime minister,” Jones said, “you’ll be a better Prime Minister for having read it.”

Well, now we have a brand new lavishly produced War and Peace from the BBC and a huge swag of new readers are about to have their vision of history altered by the great epic of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the intense joys and sorrows of a group of people who go through all this tumult and tragedy and triumph.

So why is this most epic of novels — the critic George Steiner said that Tolstoy was the successor to Homer — such a big deal from a political perspective that grey eminences of the Labor Party want to pour it into the ear of people who were destined to become long-term Coalition prime ministers?

It’s partly no doubt the way politicians are always fascinated by war. Think of the fascination of the Bob Carrs and Kim Beazleys for the American Civil War because war represents the business of politics and the exercise of power at a point of maximum extremity and drama. Hence the towering figures in the history of politics, the Lincolns and Churchills, the Roosevelts and Curtins (not to mention the representatives of the dark side like Hitler and Stalin).

Yes, but Tolstoy gives us not only a maximum immersion in the blood and detail of history, he conducts his own critique of what all this soldiering and statesmanship amounts to.

At the heart of the novel there are the great individuals who matter more to us, as readers, than the world which is won and lost. Pierre Bezukhov, the great stumbling bear of a man, bespectacled and searching for truth in the face of every possible bewilderment. He was played with empathic brilliance by Anthony Hopkins in the 1972 BBC dramatisation which ran for 15 hours, and he is played by Paul Dano (Daniel Day Lewis’ nemesis in There Will Be Blood) as a kind of tentative boy emerging as a man in the new War and Peace.  Then there’s Natasha Rostova, one of the most dazzling heroines in fiction, who was played by Audrey Hepburn in the 1956 film, and by Lily James (Disney’s latest Cinderella) in the new TV Tolstoy.

And there’s the laconic, pensive aristocrat, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, Pierre’s foil, who — going on the first episode — elicits the standout performance in the new War and Peace from James Norton, flawlessly cool and haughty and alive.

These characters — and a hundred others — show us the human face and the human cost of history. We see Andrei fighting for the Russian flag. We see him looking into the face of death on a battlefield. We see each of these men in intimate proximity with Natasha with whom the reader, like them, falls in love.

Yes, but War and Peace is a lot more than Gone with the Wind in cossack hats.

Apart from anything else — and this is one of its deep bewitchments for the political and historical reader, as well as the dragon at the gates for a lot of general readers — it presents us with Tolstoy’s theory of history as well as his depiction of how the panorama of history can look at one mythical moment with one of the most extraordinary military and political figures in the whole of history centre stage — Napoleon himself.

This means that War and Peace brings out the war gamester in a lot of people; it is one of those rare novels which has an utterly credible documentary aspect: this is the smell and smoke of battle, we feel, this is the true art of manoeuvre.

In purely literary terms this makes War and Peace, this supreme page-turner — which is extraordinarily popular in time of war, perhaps because it captures not only the excitement but the heightened leisure, the sense of waiting, of wartime — a kind of proto-modernist book, looking ahead to Joyce and Proust, because it contains, like a found object, a whole counter-narrative of historical incident.

The twist, though, is that Tolstoy’s tremendously articulated theory of history is anti-Napoleon and anti-Great Man. Tolstoy, one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived, had a low tolerance of it in others. He has a famous essay attacking Shakespeare’s King Lear which is pretty obviously provoked by the fact that he had so much in common with the old staggering fool of a king.

And his palpable desire to cut Napoleon down to size leads to one of the greatest representations we have — in quasi-fictional terms — of the diverse forces, the winds of chance, the opportunities lost and seized, the happenstance and the deeper elements which constitute history.

The portrait of Napoleon (played by Matthieu Kassovitz in the new BBC version) is brilliant but unenthralled. And placed against him is the great Russian commander Kutuzov — played by Brian Cox — who just kept nudging and tempting Napoleon towards perdition. The same technique Marshall Zhukov was to use against the invading Germans in World War II.

It’s Russia and the vast panoramic complexity of the world that wins in the end. In his new book, The Shock of Recognition — which is essentially an annotated list of his favourite music and literature — Barry Jones cites the famous essay on Tolstoy by Sir Isaiah Berlin about the hedgehog and the fox. The fox knows many things whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. But Tolstoy in his stunning — utterly confounding — way was a fox who did his best to be a hedgehog.

That’s part of why War and Peace is such a fascination for the mind with an instinct for politics and warfare. As a novelist he rides into battle to defeat Napoleon and yet provides us with the greatest representation of the Napoleonic Wars we have. And he writes as a great master of epic, of ensemble, of the massive total picture, and yet we get these intimately known images of individuals who take on the uncanny quality of people from our own past.

Not just the central trio. There’s Princess Marya, Andrei’s religious sister, their father, the cranky old Prince (Jim Broadbent in the new version), Anna Pavlovna, the supreme scheming hostess, played with absolute easy grace by Gillian Anderson, Natasha’s warm-hearted mother, the Countess Rostova (Greta Scacchi).

Old Tolstoy fans will have things to quarrel with in the new War and Peace though Andrew Davies, who did the script for the brilliant 2005 Bleak House, has stuck close to Tolstoy.

But Barry Jones is right. War and Peace will make any intelligent political leader think of how much she has to engage with the enigma of what Harold Macmillan called “events”. And what a tremendous capacity for happiness human beings can have.