Credit:
FICTION
Chinese Postman
Brian Castro
Giramondo, $32.95
“I’d rather be known posthumously,” Brian Castro remarked on stage in Melbourne earlier this year. The crowd chuckled, but Castro seemed perfectly serious.
The same melancholic wit drapes over Chinese Postman, Castro’s latest novel. It is narrated by Abraham, or “Abe”, Quin, whose life traces the loose shape of Castro’s own: he, too, is an author of 13 books, a retired professor, and a one-time postman. The book is sold as “fiction”, though I would lean towards “autofiction” – the doppelgänger has haunted Castro’s work since his first novel, Birds of Passage (1983) – though Castro himself dismisses genre as “imprison[ing] every situation within the expected”.
Regardless of classification, Chinese Postman is a tour de force.
Abe lives an unobtrusive life in the Adelaide Hills, sifting through desires met and unmet, letters read or discarded. He rescues German shepherds; befriends his gruff, grieving neighbour; spends not an insignificant time speculating on ablutions. He rarely leaves the house.
Instead, Abe dreams of “an impossible staircase like Escher’s, from which I could have thrown myself and then find that I am ascending it again and again, with hope”. He scrawls secret notes to an unrequited love, hoping she will discover his feelings; she throws them out unwittingly. He writes to his dear friend Ginnie that he has “lived most of his life backwards, without discovering happiness”. She sends back a single sentence: “Anhedonia is not without pleasure.”
Yet Abe is not so much cursed with the apparent pleasures of anhedonia as the inevitable rigours of ageing. His body has begun to betray him – “acting fast is beyond an old man, and now he realises he is uselessly meditative” – so most of the novel’s movement occurs through memory, evoking the work of Annie Ernaux, Elizabeth Hardwick or Virginia Woolf. The latter appears overtly; Abe admits that reading Woolf “was the first time a book disturbed, took the ‘I’ out of him. So ‘I’ became ‘he’.” The novel mirrors this disturbance, and Abe becomes both the narrator and the narrated.
This oscillation between “I” and “he” – sometimes occurring mid-thought – might be read as an enactment of “double-consciousness”, conceptualised by W.E.B. Du Bois as the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity”.
Castro continues to grapple with the idea of home in Chinese Postman.Credit: Peter Rae
Castro continues to grapple with the idea of home, the absurdity of borders, and the trappings of nation. As Abe notes, “In Australia, being Asian is a physical effort. During natural disasters and pandemics, the illusion of being the same is no longer the same.” Abe’s memories sometimes betray him, too; he claims he is “anti-Proustian”, someone who has “become very good at forgetting”. While this runs against the novel’s insistent reminiscence, the texture of forgetting dictates the novel’s shape, composed as it is of fragmented paragraphs, a life assembling and disassembling (perhaps dissembling, too): “he couldn’t tell stories. Fragments were what fired him.”
It’s true; Castro’s prose burns right through, recalling Woolf’s own demand of modern fiction to “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance”. Such dizzying movement refuses the easy denouement that dominates so much of contemporary Australian writing. (Abe notes, “how frivolous are books without the engagement of the writer in total desperation?”)
Castro demands a measure of work from his reader, and, unlike Abe, his letters, meticulously crafted, will not go unread or undeciphered. A game is afoot: each difficulty, a certain gift. We are pulled into the present when Abe receives an email from an unknown “Iryna Zarębina”, who writes from Ukraine: “I am reading one of your books on the doorstep of war. You once wrote about war eloquently, so the critics said. I do not believe anyone can write eloquently about war.” Assuming Iryna to be another “bearded scammer”, Abe initially ignores her, yet the old epistolarian cannot remain a holdout; he sends off a brusque reply, and their correspondence soon blossoms into witty repartee that winds throughout.
The novel’s lyricism is cut through with Abe’s musings on bowel movements, a visceral index of ageing: his is a wasting body preoccupied with bodily waste. He amuses himself by reworking the line from Eliot’s Prufrock: “Shall I wear a nappy rolled? Part my shirt-tail behind?” A memory of a young Abe cleaning toilets at Sydney University, “trading shit for library privileges”, finds neat parallel in the recent Wim Wenders film Perfect Days, which follows a man as he cleans toilets during the day, and reads Faulkner at night.
In the end, it’s extrusions all the way down, whether scatological or literary. As Abe remarks: “You give your life to your craft in order to provide some insight and light for others. But you die doing it, and not many care, having lost the communal nose for ordure.”
There is a quiet, demanding depth to this work that feels exquisitely rare. When Abe finds a book that “harnesses the most exacting of the senses”, he admits that “he cannot resist sharing and yet does not want to share it with others”. The same must be said of this novel. Chinese Postman is a secret worth sharing.
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