Book Review: The Postman by David Brin

The Postman by David Brin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I've never seen the movie for The Postman, and I'd heard mixed things about it; but whatever the case, it probably missed the zeitgeist by a decade or two, seeing as there's currently a resurgence in apocalyptic stories (perhaps as a reflection of the current state of the economy and rekindled interest in survivalism). And I enjoyed this story immensely. David Brin's language is spare and meaningful, his sense of setting and place lends a grounded reality to a destroyed future as we follow Gordon Krantz on his journey. Brin paints a world whose horrifying setting is not the real horror -- the people who survived the "doomwar" are more sinister than the setting. Heartless raiders known as Holnists/survivalists who take grisly trophies off of victims in a "might makes right" philosophy of life, impoverished and despairing farmers struggling to get through their day to day lives, and a new generation who no longer believe the tall tales of a world populated with computers and scientists and learned professionals, or even the faded fantasy of democracy -- all products of a new Dark Age.

Gordon remembers a world before, when people lived a better quality of life; and as much as he attempts to keep his head down and continue his loner existence, eking out his survival by reciting Shakespeare and long-forgotten songs to scattered villages, he finds himself accidentally stoking the faint embers of hope in the demoralized survivors when he strips a postman's corpse of his uniform and wears it into town. Suddenly, Gordon is being accorded a new found esteem, despite his protests that he is not a post man -- a forgotten relic of the past era whose original job of delivering the mail has been blown out of proportion into legend by the townspeople. They remember post men as heroic soldiers from another age. By the time he readies to leave the village, townspeople are handing him letters for him to deliver, and he cannot bear to tell them no. Unwittingly, he carries on the illusion that he is a postman as he delivers letters to the next town, and soon the lie takes on a life of its own as Gordon becomes a revolutionizing force in this post-apocalyptic world.

It's interesting to compare this to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, in as much as they share a similar idea of the world after apocalypse; but where they differ is that The Road is a bleak journey, and so is Brin's vision of the world -- but Brin offers a refreshing look at the power of myth in a world without heroes. While some would say there's no comparison between the two because The Road is literary where The Postman is a work of genre fiction, I would say that no one has any business using the lines and definitions demarcated by marketing language. Simply because we shelve one book in a different row than another does not change the words inside; Brin elevated his work above many through one, golden virtue: he told a good story.



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