The Mandarin Syndrome: The Secret Life of Senior Bureaucrats

Peter Martin is a senior projects editor at the University of Ottawa
Press.

Though shortlisted, this book didn’t win the 1990 Leacock Award.
Perhaps because there’s often a non-Leacockian, even cruel, edge to
its humor. Perhaps because some of the book’s sallies are subtle to
the point of incomprehensibility. (This latter may be a problem of
translation; Henrie’s book was originally published as La vie secrиte
des grands bureaucrates.)

These characteristics aside, this is an entertaining and insightful
assault on Ottawa’s (and everywhere’s) mandarinate. Under 20 topic
headings—such as “Merit,” “Rivals,” “Tactics,” and
“Culture”—Henrie dissects the higher levels of bureaucracy with
sharp instruments: epigrams, mock aphorisms, vignettes, anecdotes, and
microessays. For the flavor taste these: “Waiters wait, boxers box and
thinkers think. Do not conclude from this, however, that senior public
servants serve.” “Among the mandarinate, friendship is not a
sentiment. It is a decision.”

Henrie has nothing good to say about our mandarins. His senior
bureaucrats lack even Sir Humphrey Appleby’s confident urbanity—the
only real difference, perhaps, between Whitehall and the West Block?