(courtesy Penguins Books Australia)
Delving deep into someone’s life over a long period of time is something rarely afforded to us unless they are a family member or close friend.
We might know people well and converse, laugh and cry with them over all sorts of life events but really seeing what makes them tick, how years’ of life experience build from one thing to another is a rare thing, a privilege to which most of us are not exposed.
But in The Correspondent, a marvellous novel from Virginia Evans, we are given the great good fortune to get to know Sybil Van Antwerp, retired from a storied career in law, who dispenses her wisdom and biting observations in letter to everyone she writes to and who keeps the world at an arm’s length that keeps her emotionally walled away in her beautiful home with the fabulous view.
It’s not that Sybil is a recluse but she has certainly found a way to keep everyone at bay, including her children who don’t share any confidences readily with her, or at all really, and onetime close friends, her only accedence to societal requirements being to observe duty when it calls such as giving a eulogy at the funeral of a close friend and colleague with whom she shared a storied career.
Her life is full of the correct things to say and do while her letters to people such as her sister-in-law and best friend Rosalie – they married brothers and so have remain connected in more ways than one – admit the truth of what she is actually thinking and feeling.
Dear Mr Lübeck,
Thank you for the exquisite white roses you left on my porch on my birthday, May 29. Furthermore, I received your voice message this morning. I was delivered home by taxi last night due to a minor car accident, but everything is being taken care of.
Regards,
Sybil Van Antwerp.
On the surface, it would appear Sybil has it all – a home, a family, friends and a career that sees her still highly regarded in legal circles – but away from all the assumptions and appearances, most notably in her letters which are as sharply adherent to convention as they are cutting in their certainty, she is alone, emotionally cut-off, a woman who sends out all the right signals but who is dead to the world inside.
To be honest, in the first letters you read from her to various people including Harry Landy, the troubled young teenage son of a legal friend and her gay brother Felix, with whom she is actually quite close, you get the sense of someone who has a good heart and a sensible mind but who is so guarded as to render those fine qualities into irrelevancy.
She is, woven in around all the right words and the correctly expressed emotions, a not very likeable person and while you admire the woman you can see through the cracks, the outer appearance would suggest someone you may not necessarily want to get to know.
But thanks to the empathetic, beautifully warm writing of Evans, Sybil is likeable and intriguing enough that you are more than ready to stick around because while there might be prickly reserve in abundance, there’s also the promise of real humanity just underneath.
It’s the gradual, moving and utterly enrapturing peeling away of Sybil’s well-honed and fiercely guarded reserve that powers The Correspondent which sees the letters which make its form and substance move from coldly observant to something approaching warmly confessional as the onetime woman of great reserve admits to secrets and pain hidden away and begins to engage with the world again.
The rich beauty of this hugely affecting novel is that it nails what it is like to have hidden yourself away from the world for very good reason, and you ache with recognition at how easy and sometimes necessary it is to wall yourself away from the things that have so deeply hurt and damaged you.
Sybil is in many ways every person who has suffered great loss or made searing mistake, and while what this is exactly must be left to the wholly rewarding reading of The Correspondent which will reach deep into your heart and soul and make you feel almost everything, they significant enough as issues that she has preferred to hide them away than admit to what lies beneath all the lack of contact in person and preference for correspondence in letter (preferred) or email (tolerated if barely).
Evans does a moving job of forcing Sybil to re-engage with a world in real time and not at a distance via her assigned letter writing slots during the week and we are given the inestimable joy of watching her come alive again and seeing how powerful an effect this has on other people around her.
I’m absolutely frantic, happy, nervous, buzzy. It’ll be time to clue in my brother, Felix, now, I suppose. Or maybe not. Maybe my girlfriends, but no. They will want to participate in the letter writing. I may tell my neighbour. He’s a gentle sort, a good listener.
Fill me in on your life.
Sybil
The reckoning that confronts Sybil is a long time coming but when it comes, it is transformational in its impact.
While the publishing world is full of novels about once-closed off people who, for one reason or another come wonderfully back alive again, and yes, they are a joy to read because who doesn’t love a redemption story, The Correspondent feels like it carries more than a little extra on its journey from a woman at great remove from life and the people whom she loves and knows to someone actively engaging with them once again to everyone’s considerable benefit.
Not least Sybil whose letters and emails lose the biting hands-off tone of the start of the novel, assuming as they do a rich sense of openness and vulnerable humanity, the kind we are all avoid because of the discomfort it brings, which ultimately brings her great release and a sense that life can really mean something again in the here and now.
The Correspondent is a joy to read, not simply because of its redemptive qualities which are a joy to read, but because of the quality of the writing which calibrates Sybil’s awakening pitch perfectly, and which peels away the protective layers and buried secrets to reveal someone who wants to be connected (with friends and family, old and new), who wants to love (even romantically) and who, crucially, wants to be known and who, thanks to the events conveyed with nuanced thoughtfulness and great emotion in Sybil’s letters and emails, has all that happen in ways that she likely thought she would never experience.