The Postman

A few days ago, a man riding a bicycle with a plastic red basket held tight to the front handlebars, swerved in front of my car. He was wearing a vest (even though it had just been raining) and looked docilely at me as I granted him his life, as if he knew something about the rules of the road that I didn't. He was either a postman or a thief who had stolen a postman's bike. The latter, I think, because it was Sunday.

We are going to stick with postman because, when I think of post-people, I think of the Borrowers riding spools of thread.

In the bad old days, when explorers were subjugating land, animals and other people, the postal workers were right behind them. The backbone of commerce, society and subjugation. According to various Western (in the Wild Wild sense) TV series, the postmaster doubled as the editor of the local daily; was tongue-tied but honourable and trustworthy; and unfortunately tended to die or be horribly maimed unless he had a heavy-duty rifle behind the counter.

Also unfortunately, the postmaster was never the hero.

Also featuring in the Westerns of long pauses, long stares and short lives, was the 'Pony Express', a service with the Olympian flavour of the ancient Greek scout who ran through war for days and days to tell someone something important. These men swore an oath, wore uniforms of blue and white, and raced across rivers and semi-arid regions carrying letters. Believing in the power of the pen over that of the knife, arrow or rifle, but never learning to wield it as a weapon, some lost their scalps... and their letters.

One day, our children won't be able to make heads nor tails of a story in which someone risked their life carrying words on paper vast distances.

Speaking of: in 1985, when David Brin wrote The Postman, the internet was still being molded as a security solution to international war, secretaries used carbon paper to make copies of memos and wireless referred exclusively to radios. As a science writer and physicist for NASA, Brin no doubt saw further into the future than most, but he and I still imagine the 2011 restoration of the United States from as far apart as the northern edge of the prairie to the southern.

The letter was under threat from the fax and photocopier (the 2-in-1) (and yes, I'm old enough and young enough to remember this) in 1985. Now the letter and the fax - nevermind the typewriter - are novelties. The last time I received a letter was a 'Seasons greeting' card. Does a postcard count? I have cards from Chicago, Hong Kong and the Grand Canyon, sent in between IMs and smses.

No, this isn't completely true, because last Sunday I almost ran over the shade of a postman. I receive my post at home (account statements, sale pamphlets and the occasional plea to take out a loan) so sometimes I catch postmen and -women mid-posting. They always have a bike, with a branded basket, and uniform. (Usually also post.) They are always polite, but perhaps this is because I always greet them first.

The Postman is a post-apocalyptic tale of hope set in 2011. The apocalypse was a sewing basket of the things the media warn us about: nuclear war, technological war, disease, starvation, natural disaster and human nature. Ten years later, only wanderers and small villages have survived, by avoiding all other people - oh and the so-called survivalists, not the reality show kind whose backstabbing (accurately) looks like the games of little girls.

Survivalists believe literally in the survival of the fittest: the strongest band together to pick off the weak who also band together to become strong. Those they don't kill they subjugate, or put aside to play with later.

Gordon, the hero, is a wanderer. He wanders from village to village, scavenging and trying to discard the flabby manners of civilisation. But really he wanders looking for a hero (cue the Bonnie Tyler song) who will restore his civilisation to him. One day, he scavenges the leather jacket and cap of a postman. In the last days of the apocalypse, post became the last frontier of communication. The jacket and cap bear the badge of the Pony Express (except they drove Jeeps).

Misunderstanding upon misunderstanding later, Gordon is hard at work spreading the word of the Restored United States and a renewed postal service. The implication being that what makes civilisation civilised is a network of communication. Before you judge him (or not) he's not a different kind of survivalist, feeding people's hopes (and himself) with lies. He believes his own lies - or he believes in hope, at least.

The (un)reality of The Postman is additionally unreal with thirty years between us and Brin. Thirty years of the evolution of the portable phone from a bulky home phone to slim gadgets that structure our lives and fit into our pockets. During which people forgot how to spell anything but phonetically. During which dictionaries of new words have been coined. During which Pluto was demoted. Populated with Dolly and Curiosity and Obama and Bieber.

The book is set in 2011, three years ago (perhaps people have forgotten how to count as well as spell, huh?). This post-apocalypse seems more charming than apocalyptic: a nostalgia for small-town values without losing the best of modern life. It imagines computers as thinking feeling judging beings, able to hold meaningful conversations and evaluate data sets.

And most importantly, it assumes that postmen are an everyday sight.

Compare this with the terrifying landscape of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. There are survivalists; their camps of subjugated lambs - I mean, subjects - are the only pockets of, um, civilisation; but no representatives of technology, communication or organised government. Instead of wandering from place to place, the reader is confined to the steps of the merry band of two and their - shudder - trolley.

The contemporary imagination is not more bloody or more cynical - Dante wrote the Inferno in the 14th century and the Nordic pantheon includes a one-eyed combination of god and devil. The Incas sacrificed people in the thousands, depending what they were praying for.

But choosing a postman as your hero seems naive. Even the character acknowledges that more than once. He does so because postmen had become cartoon regular, getting chased by dogs, bitten by dogs, soaked by sprinklers and so on. Today, postmen are made-for-TV regulars and that is mostly how we know them. If my door didn't open onto my postbox, I wouldn't know postmen and their bikes existed (I don't have dogs or sprinklers, luckily).

This is a very superficial review of a book I enjoyed. I enjoyed it, but it didn't make me think. It didn't make me think because a lot of this has been thunk. So much has passed between a date when the letter held at least a third of the written-word market and a year when there is one cellphone for every person in the world (there's a tip for the 1985 stock market) that the past seems more absurd than the horrifying future.