The Postman by David Brin

From the title I thought I was in for a romance, or a novel about the importance of lines of communication, or a period piece from the 50s or 60s–either in the 19th or 20th century. I had no idea what to expect. I did not predict this potent portrayal of myth and symbol, organized around a post-apocalyptic story of an Oregon struggling between selfishness and community.

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.

The Trial by Franz Kafka

(Please keep in mind that this is an unfinished novel published posthumously and seemingly against the wishes of the author. Though his asking his friend to burn all his unfinished works may have been a joke because he probably asked the one friend least likely to do it. But that's a debate I don't know enough about to have.)

I keep coming back to Kafka’s impenetrableness, in my mind, with a reflection that I spent the whole novel thinking, "What's this all about?", and, “No person would react that way!” I’m not thinking of any single way that a character reacts—except possibly for the Lawyer’s maid, though even she seems a caricature of people I know—but rather in two actions that characters complete, in a row. These actions do not line up to. For instance, K is meeting with the manufacturer at the bank, and suddenly his actions, mood, character changes so drastically that there seems no thread tying him and earlier him together. This, of course, could be due to a point Kafka is trying to make. But I couldn’t tell because I found too few clues in here as to what Kafka is on about. So, what clues did I find?

• Religion. Kafka’s religion is unstated, but he deals with religious themes and things that ape religion in ways that assure religion is never far from the page. The closing sacrificial scene, the priest’s scene, the penitent waiting rooms, the kissing of the lawyer’s hand—these things are so reminiscent of religious experiences, religious acts, that religion is ever on the tongue of this novel. And the clearest analogy to religion in the novel is the court system.


• Court. The main theme on-page is either Joe K’s psychology, or the court system, which adheres to no known court system—or so say the experts. Is Kafka taking the piss out of the court system?
  —Yes, probably. Yet at the same time, he is taking the piss out of justice, and laws, only as they are implemented by humans. Kafka's objections, except for one example in the conversation with the priest, seem to be about laws and court systems that reflect little of the Socratic sense of justice and personal rights. These impenetrable, uncommunicative, and unrealistic systems are what give the book its dystopian mood. This vast, nebulous, unknowable, and oppressive court system is unrealistic, but may ape aspects of legal systems that are tenable.
  —But maybe the courts are a metaphor for something. And if so, the merchant at the lawyer’s office seems to give a clue that it may be a metaphor for sociability, some egalitarianistic pun on courtly behavior. Society requires a sort of game, or performance, for one to not be considered crazy. So does this court system.

• Theater. And that performative aspect is huge here. By the time I got to the final scene in the quarry with the sacrificial altar stone, I thought we would at last get a scene with no audience. But somebody throws a window open to watch from a distance. Every scene has an audience, even if that audience is sometimes just K. And K consistently refers to theater terminology to try and interpret his perceptions. The theater of life, of living in a city, like in the fragment of him on the divan, provides an energetic undercurrent for the novel.


• Sex. The lawyer’s maid has a fine figure and is attracted to all of the defendants; Elsa is K’s unseen regular squeeze; Fräulein Bürstner and K seem to share something more than a kiss, at least some underlying sexual tension exists there; the woman whose husband is the court usher tells K he can do anything he wants to her. Yet K gets more good advice, instead of just promises of advice, from the painter, who is surrounded by girls.

• Business. K’s personal business is always getting in the way of his professional business as CFO of a bank. And on this aspect of the court, K’s arrest provides both opportunity and impediment. Opportunity comes in the form of contacts with the prosecutor and the painter, while he worries that his arrest and trial are taking too much time away from his professional life. He works late often, and is seen to be in the office early, and is praised for his organizational skills at work—this is clearly an important aspect of K’s being.

So, it seems that Kafka is accusing government of inherent evil, or a lack of conscientiousness. For example, in the court itself, the idea that the accused could even know the accusation against them is ridiculous. But not just the government, the whole of the society because both are indistinguishable in areas. Yet, it seems that Kafka is content as a writer to offer pithy phrases like, “They're talking about things of which they don't have the slightest understanding, anyway. It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.” He writes these wonderful phrases, and some truly memorable scenes, instead of sharpening his overall point or indictment. It seems that he might be full of himself: too sure that readers will pick up on what he’s after to actually put in enough clues. I feel that K’s psychology and impenetrable actions detract from the overall pointedness of the novel by confusing the issues being discussed and even how they are being discussed. How much of this is due to its unfinished nature, I don't know.

But I also appreciate the open-endedness of it all as much as I am annoyed by it. I don’t want to be spoon fed. Sure, maybe a little more given to the reader would have been profitable. I get the sense that the reader’s perception of events differs from the narrator’s, which differs from K’s. And this confusion reigns in the reading of this novel. But this confusion is probably the point of the novel! The court is after all affecting K in the same way. And what a mood and scene set by Kafka, where the reader is right there with K, feeling frustrated and annoyed, yet reading on because of the wonderful writing and scenes. Kafka creates and sustains such a poignant mood that, for all his impenetrableness, I found the book easy to finish and well worth reading. Sure, with something like the Metamorphosis, or In the Penal Colony, I come away with a much better idea of Kafka’s point, so I'm more likely to recommend those. But for fans of Kafka, this is a can't miss novel.