This may be my fourth or fifth time through The Postman, and I still think it’s an excellent book. Sure, there are flaws, but it manages to be engrossing while it brings up issues I find fascinating. It does bring them up in a heavy-handed way, but what the heck.
Thematically, the book is about myths, and the way they are constructed and manipulated. The Postman himself, of course, uses the story of a Restored United States and the lingering image of the Pony Express to con people into cooperating with him. The folks at Eugene use the myth of the supermachine to con people into cooperating with them, and the Holnists use the myth of the übermensch to con people into cooperating with them. In order to do that, the manipulators find they have to restrict their actions in certain ways; they are manipulated, eventually, by those myths they manipulate.
In the end, though, the world is saved by a neo-hippie augment who beats up the bad guy but declines the crown. Yay for plot! Boo for coherent themes!
Oh, and there’s the strange and confused take on feminism. Frankly, I don’t know what to make of it; I can’t figure out whether Mr. Brin seriously intends the women to be real women with ideas descended from today’s feminism, or whether he is intending to make a new, post-apocalyptic feminism, and I can’t even tell whether he is portraying certain ideas as attractive but wrong, as crazy, as right, as plot devices, or what. I certainly wouldn’t blame anybody who hates the book because of its treatment of women and gender, but to me its one failure in a book with some pretty impressive successes.
One of those successes, by the way, is that he writes about the first generation post-apocalypse in a way that reminds me of how much there is to lose. Specific luxuries come up—electric light, recorded music, free time, casual civic trust, transparency in government, incaution—that are lost, or nearly lost, and I think about them in a new light. That’s a useful function of this sub-genre, and Mr. Brin does it really well.
,
-Vardibidian.
is your name tohu bohu?
My blog’s name is Tohu Bohu, because it’s a tohu-bohu of a blog, a formless void without structure or coherence (see Gen 1:2). William Gladstone refers to “the tohu-bohu of inquiries, which have never yet emerged from the stage of chaos.” That’s us here.
My nom de blogue is Vardibidian, for reasons that seemed good and sufficient at the time. My actual name is something else altogether.
Thanks,
-V.