Chinese Postman

 I first came across Brian Castro’s fiction in the 1990s, with the intriguing Double Wolf (1991). A long time passed and I rediscovered his writing, reading The Garden Book (2005), The Bath Fugues (2009) and Street to Street (2012) within a few years. Finally, I met Brian in person in 2018 at an artist retreat run by the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. His presentation was entirely about Coetzee -- he struck me as a modest and friendly man -- but there was a moment around a campfire where writers shared their work, and Brian was a sympathetic and encouraging listener. 

Chinese Postman opens with short paragraphs that move between third person and first-person narrative, as the narrator calls attention to a ‘bitter and twisted man’ who ‘sees nothing but fragments’ (p. 1).  He is a lonely, enduring the killing zone as his friends pass away, with a neighbour and dogs for company. Soon we are told that ‘He talks mainly to himself. Clears his throat often’ (an italicised section of thinking follows) and then a line break and a restart on the same thought in first-person: ‘I snort a lot. I spit.’ (p.2). 

Having just included an italicised section, Castro continues: ‘He hates these italics inside the mind’. Perhaps this is because writers ‘cannot read them’, or because they reveal their narcissism (p. 2). Either way, the story is just beginning and already Castro’s metafictional commentary is captivating, as in a paragraph on page 3 which begins with an aphorism (‘Writing makes matter out of metaphysics’). Castro then names his narrator as Abe Quin, ‘Not Abe Quill’ – a man who ‘makes Kirigami flowers out of newspaper … loves to see them blossom when cast into the waters of the lake’ [and] notes that ‘Aphorisms should have the same effects of blooming … without metaphysics or explanations’. 

What follows is the temporary blooming of many kirigami flowers: paper folded and then cut, folded and cut again. The narrative fragments work like this, initially to introduce Quin, his voice and character, his unabashed commentary on writing and life. Soon we have his professorship, and his beginnings in ‘this country’ (Australia) as a ‘walking postman’. This becomes an idea that is both historical – ‘an algorithm proposed by mathematician Kwan Mei-Ko’ during the Great Leap Forward -- and metaphorical: ‘I I understood how to eliminate milage by studying the vertices, never traversing the same street twice’ (p. 7). There is, indeed, something three dimensional about Castro’s writing in Chinese Postman. 

What happens in the novel? An elderly man, a writer and retired professor (biographically similar to Castro) lives alone and begins a correspondence with a younger woman, a woman suffering the misfortunes of war in the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Her name is Iryna Zarebina, and initially he isn’t sure if he is being drawn into a scam, but the correspondence appears to demonstrate a proudly independent woman of high intelligence, nearing forty, with a family to care for (a mother and daughter, and a husband fighting the Russians). In any case, Quin confesses a long history of flirtations (he doesn’t use this word): 

… The life I needed was just this mixture of solitude and encounter; mind games and projected futures; but not relationships … I agonised, I drank, I imagined. And that was the best thing that could happen to a writer (p. 157).  

One senses in this correspondence the clever mind of a writer, aware of the problems of his age, the distance to the woman of his interest, the potential for him to be a fool, and the same combination of agony, drink and imagination that leads him (Quin) onwards in his quest as something good that could happen to this melancholic writer, alone in the Adelaide hills. 

Towards the end of the novel, after reading one of her wise emails, Quin confesses something that has long been obvious to the reader: ‘In fact, Quin had fallen in love with Iryna’. The irony continues: ‘He was a bookish old man who was not romantically foolish [He is] but was now in the grips of a real woman [Let’s hope, since we cannot be sure]. 

In writing this, I have only given a glimpse of the plot (and the plot is really just this imagined space) and something about Castro’s double narration, but the pleasure in reading the text is the unfolding of so many paper flowers containing much wisdom (melancholic thoughts about aging, glimpses back on a life in its many acts), and much that entertains. Just as Quin feels he is unable to relate to ‘ordinary people’, the novel is the work of one ‘fired up by fragments and fragments …', a form which brings 'new insights into form and ditched wholeness' (p. 101). Earlier, Quin writes/speaks/thinks:

Perhaps he was unsuitable for the normal world. The damage that literature does is to make you unsuitable for the real world, but not for imagined other-worlds. It opens a prison door but lets escape an eternally unfulfilled desire (p. 43). 

Here Castro creates a character who draws the reader into an imagined other world, full of unfulfilled desires, but life-affirming just the same. At least that’s what this writer and reader thinks, ending with my own aphorism. We desire to our final breath: let me live or die trying.