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Letters from the Fire
Investigate Magazine, June 2000
The new buzz is the email novel which is of course the epistolary novel of the 18th century reborn on the glowing screen. Is it really any different? Yes and no. It's clearly the same format though the email novel can allow sudden parenthetic interruptions and tends to prompt shorter, more rapid communication (though one could ask why). This aspect, as the text gleefully informs us, speeds up everything -- even relationships. In many ways it's the ideal communications instrument of the new millennium -- cyberspace-based (i.e. electronic), quick, intimate but safely distant. Also today's email novel tends to be written by two individuals actually communicating through cyberspace. The result tends to look like cinema verité in print rather than a work of fiction. A luddite in this area, I tend to regard an email as a second-rate phone call.
I better not omit the content of Letters from the Fire which is war -- specifically the war in Kosovo. Milosevic v Clinton. Serbs v Albanians. The book begins with a peppery exchange between Aleksandra Kovacevic, smack in the war zone, and Dave Barker, American journalist firing off his missives from the safety of the United States.
Initially Dave takes the standard western line denouncing the killing of Albanians in Kosovo and supporting NATO but as Aleksandra argues her points with greater passion backed up with historical facts he begins to view it differently. Aleksandra informs Dave (and no doubt many of us readers) that 50 000 Serbs were slaughtered in one province alone during World War 2 and 1.2 million Serbs killed in World War 1. He comes to condemn NATO bombing at least. Aleksandra has also protested against Milosevic. So neither is blindly patriotic.
Gradually the exchange between Aleksandra and Dave widens. They spend a lot of time discussing whether the dying wish of a crocodile worshipper that his child be brought up in the sacrificial faith should be respected. One of those debates they have in philosophical circles, I guess. While this is part of the two characters getting to know each other -- by testing each other's systems of values -- it was less engrossing than the heated war dialogue. But that too had a hectoring note -- too close to life to be art. Mind you, that's what you would expect with a novel made of emails.
The middle part of the book has a lot of enthusing about emails and the Internet, including the rather naive idea that the Internet brings us closer together. (They said television would be a great educator.) The wonderful irony is that when Dave feels he must actually speak to Aleksandra the experience renders them both temporarily inarticulate. And good on him for declaring his love live (on the phone anyway) and not safely on the mini screen.
Sadly, war wins. Aleksandra is killed by a bomb and the couple did not get to test their love. Would it have been like that of so many who meet on the Internet, destined to fail? (But that would have been a different novel.) Letters from the Fire is a passionate, gripping, political novel that will also have internetters nodding their heads in agreement over the virtues of email but arouses scepticism in a snailmailer like myself.
Michael Morissey