The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

I tend to avoid books (and movies for that matter) that others gush about. I think, ‘it can’t be that good!’ Well, The Correspondent has proved me wrong: it is that good!

Some reviewers have noted that Sybil is unlikable. I disagree. She is honest in her letters. She doesn’t censor her thoughts. Sometimes they are mean. Sometimes they are unPC. But this was one of things I liked about her! She wasn’t perfect. She didn’t always say the right thing or react in a sympathetic way: in other words, she felt to me like a real person.

The form of telling the story via letters and emails may appear an easy one. But as the story progressed, I realised that it is, from a writer’s POV, very difficult. Enough information must be revealed to make the story flow, but too much information would make the correspondence appear stilted.

Novels featuring adoption usually do so to tell some sort of awful traumatic tale. Sybil’s adoption was a happy one. Her parents loved her, and she them. She had thought about it from time to time, wondering why her birth mother gave her up: ‘These are thoughts I’ve had, but not in an urgent sense, just a little bruise I’d press on every once in a while’. I am adopted and I really related to Sybil’s feelings about ‘this thing I have felt my whole life, and that is, a sense of something missing, this curiosity of why my mother let me go’. This sense of abandonment can be crushing at times.

I could not put this book down. I didn’t leave the house, I read through my lunch and my dinner and well into the night to finish it. It made me want to write letters to my loved ones. Sybil even gives us some guidance as to how to approach the writing: ‘You mustn’t rush. When you rush you pen things you didn’t mean and you tire. It takes patience to say exactly what one means, to think of the right word…Remember words, especially those written, are immortal’. She feels that, ‘reaching out in correspondence is really one of the original forms of civility in the world’. God knows this world needs a little civility!

Reviewed by Gaby Meares
SMSA Member