Postcrossing Blog

When I recently posted some mini-reviews, I talked about being blown away by Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent, so here is the promised post about that book! It’s an epistolary novel told entirely through letters from and to the protagonist, Sybil van Antwerp. She’s a retired woman who worked in law and now strictly structures her life around reading and her correspondence, and I really wasn’t sure in reading the blurb whether it’d actually be interesting for me: I thought it might be a bit too literary, or lacking in plot. Honestly, I picked it up mostly because I thought it’d be interesting for a review for Postcrossing! I wasn’t wrong about that, at least…

I’d also wondered how successful the epistolary format would be: apart from the preface and maybe one or two other sections, it’s entirely made up of letters (though some of them aren’t sent), which is also quite the feat. It can be hard to make a story run well through multiple different letters in a way that feels fairly natural but which the reader can follow, but Evans definitely nailed it.

The story doesn’t really have a plot as such, so I was right on that score, though there are a few themes and events that run through the letters. It’s definitely more of a character study, and the letters were the perfect way to show us Sybil’s character (and those of her family and friends)—flaws and all, because Sybil’s absolutely no saint, though she’s no devil either.

There were a couple of things I didn’t love, but they didn’t mar my enjoyment of the book: the main one was that it could be hard to tell whether the letters were directly responding to one another or whether there were gaps in between. They’re dated, and in the right sequence, but I realised after a bit that some of them were responding to letters that aren’t “included”. It makes sense as a decision to keep things a bit tighter and avoid padding it out, but it did feel like a bit of a leap between letters in terms of events or changing attitudes. It’s worth knowing going in that there are letters “missing” (so to speak, since of course, they aren’t real letters and the “missing” letters don’t actually exist), so you don’t always get the full story.

In the end, I absolutely tore through the book, and really enjoyed my time getting to understand Sybil and her circle through the letters. There are some hard-hitting themes (coming to terms with disability, family rifts, and the loss of a child) which it unfurls carefully, giving you a piece at a time and making sure it’ll land before you learn the truth about each bit of the story. Highly recommended!