This book does exactly what I’m looking for: it tells a riveting story of action and consequence while still spending enough time on ideas, thoughts, and character development to provide depth and inspiration to the reader. On the one hand, there are fights, shootouts, chases, cons, sex scenes, and drugs–obstacles to overcome, consequences for actions, deaths. On the other hand, in the long spaces in between the terror and the screaming, the Postman’s mind mulls over guilt, his own idealism, and a dozen other topics enough to intrigue me, to give me new thoughts on old topics. Brin balances between these two tendencies beautifully.
“Who will take responsibility?” the technology of the past almost asks, in an almost echo of that ubi sunt motif so familiar to Lit students. “Who killed America?” asks the author. “Who or what could rebuild America?” asks the main character. Critically, Brin doesn’t stop with answering the “Who” in each of these sentences–he also asks “and why?” These are some of the questions guiding the novel, and I thoroughly enjoyed their windings. I think the following are the main themes in this novel:
–The Postman takes responsibility somewhat accidentally. His past is searching for somebody who has taken responsibility for the future: a leader and a group focused on not just survival, but bringing some of the aspects of American culture back. Once connection to his past is taken away from him by the loss of the notebook, his role starts to change–he’s spent so much time trying to find somebody, imagining somebody who has taken responsibility, that he starts to become what he was looking for. Yet, this responsibility comes with a whole heap of guilt, and the inevitability of taking on more guilt. It seems to be this aversion to guilt that has the Postman himself not wanting responsibility, but desperately searching for a person who has taken responsibility. (And in this case I mean responsibility as a kind of symbol of leadership–not literally taking responsibility for the nuclear war that created this mess)
–Expedient decisions, choices, and situations today will plot a course through tomorrow that excludes other options. So, at the most basic level death limits somebody’s options. At a less final level, the Postman picking up the postal uniform because he was cold, and the letter bags because they were good packs, limits his ability to perform his original function of wandering minstrel, because he has taken on a symbology that people long for. He is forced into playing a different role because of the symbol he has put on himself. He starts by looking for this mythical society trying to make things better, then he actually finds a couple of them, but instead of his original goal of settling into a society like that, he ends up being stuck in the wandering lifestyle because of the uniform, the symbol.
–Symbols help establish myths, they become nodes in a network of symbols that forms a type of web that ties a culture together–a myth, in other words. A symbol without context is nothing inherently. A postal uniform on a dead body in a jeep represents nothing more than a strip of cloth and some sewing, a potential warmth to a freezing man. But, when worn in front of people who remember postmen from almost 20 years ago, having not seen one or had much inter-community communication (outside of bullets) for that length of time, the uniform-symbol becomes a hope, a node of nostalgia that brings other possible contexts to mind–communication, order, regularity, money, and something bigger than the immediate community and environment. This small symbol starts carrying more weight and integrates into the context in ways that start to support other government functions–schools, diversifying gene pools, hope, alliances, defense against common enemies, community. The people who accept this symbol, and who are affected by it, are able to form a culture through a collection of symbols and a common enemy. But then, to drive the point home, we see the creation of a new myth as Dena’s death becomes a symbol, and others’ interpretations become symbols. When these symbols start to spread and combine, they start to form the myth of the night of Judiths, the idea of feminism, the idea that strength in forms other than biceps can still be strength. When enough myths come together–Cyclops, the Restored United States, Dena, Powhatan, video games, and the common enemy of the Rogue River Holnists–a culture starts to form. A culture composed of some shared core beliefs and priority structures.
–But the major hurdle to this cultural formation is selfishness. When survival is suspect, selfishness seems necessary at times: if it’s either them or me eating, it makes sense to attempt to be the one that eats. Yet, if everybody works together, they can all eat some. This basic question–individual strength versus community strength–seems to be important in the novel. Maybe I just noticed it more because I live in North Idaho where there are a lot of preppers and people only serving their family, not their community as a whole. Another way that Brin talks about these competing priorities is through the contrasts between fighting for survival, fighting for big ideas or ideals, and fighting for the immediate tribe or small community. He ends the book on a note of bringing together, of the big ideas being a net positive, but he wrinkles that conclusion throughout the book with the philosophizing of the selfish Holnists, and with a history of war:
“Where is it written that one should only care about big things? I fought for big things, long ago… for issues, principles, a country. Where are all of them now?... I found out something, you know. I discovered that the big things don’t love you back. They take and take, and never give in return. They’ll drain your blood, your soul, if you let them, and never let go.”Or,
“It did you no good to fight for the Big Things . . . for civilization, for instance. All you accomplished was getting young girls and boys to believe in you—to throw their lives away in worthless gestures, accomplishing nothing.”Yet the ideas and ideals, when pursued appropriately, when balanced with preservation and hope and a clear understanding of possibilities both good and bad, is the ultimate thrust of the novel. Johnny embodies these arguments: he recognizes the importance of the bear patch on the injured soldier’s arm, yet he stays too focused on the sanctity of the symbol he embodies, the postal service. The first leads the world to a better place and Johnny’s curiosity about it helps. The second shows an obsession that ultimately occludes the context and kills him, putting everybody around him into greater danger when they need to escape and communicate the existence of the bear patch to another group of people.
–A culture, being a web of myths that hold together a people in commonalities, will be killed from within, not without. The selfish strength of the Holnists is what ultimately kills America, not the diseases, famines, nuclear explosions, or resource scarcity. The people who opt out of society and prey upon it from within, who take the benefits of that society–technology, knowledge, food, clothing, life–and use those against the society are more dangerous than possible invaders, nuclear winter, or plagues. This powerful message is repeated a few times through the book–some with showing and some with telling. And Brin even allows some even-handed wrinkles to come in near the end, as the Holnists get a chance to explain their position and drop their anonymity in a way that I respect. They are still judged wrong, but at least Brin gives them their best side through telling.
–The other themes within this book are about how we personally carry guilt; how strength is not just the most guns and smarts, but can also be found in community and trust, in feminism (via the Book of Judith) and the postal service; doing what is necessary and doing what is moral; and duty contrasted with personal desire.
Mix all these discussions in with a plot that moves, that allows consequences and actions, that kills off main characters, and we’ve got a novel that does everything I want. Sure, there are aspects of this novel I think could’ve been done better, but they’re niggling around the edges of what is, to me, a fantastic novel.
My main problem is with the pacing. For a book so stuffed with complexities and interesting musings, it starts with a simple pulp fiction shootout, not giving enough hints towards the complexity within. I kept reading simply because Brin’s rewarded my patience in other books. And this story exploded outwards into an amazing kaleidoscope of a complex society facing complex problems and discovering/deciding on complex systems to put in place–rewarding indeed. However, one side effect of focusing on the musings about myth and symbol and responsibility and ego and community is that I stopped caring or thinking about the history of the world being described, and the revelation about survivors from a government program at the end surprised me. To be clear, I’m not sure whether that’s because I personally focused on the musings, or whether Brin made a mistake in bringing in new story elements too late in the novel. (As I’ve said before, I prefer the early Pixar tactic of introducing every suspension of disbelief in the first 10 minutes, then letting everything else fall out of that. Here the past culture is technologically advanced in terms of computing, but suddenly they are also advanced in terms of gene modification, and that was something else for the reader to accept, in the last couple chapters of books.) However, Brin gets away with the two problems I list above because, well, the rest of the book is brilliant, and because he has set this expansion of topics, theme, and scope up by having an outsider coming into Central and Western Oregon, knowing nothing about what he is stepping into–readers learn along with the eponymous postman.
There, niggling over. Now this is one of the best David Brin books I’ve ever read, and I would recommend it to almost everybody. It is that good.
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