A Novel Letter

The Goodreads website features multiple reviews, overwhelmingly four/five stars and glowing: “Charming, lovely, delightful, great characters”. But a vocal polar response  exists too: “no voice, no plot, shallow characters.” I found myself agreeing with certain aspects of both. Yes, it’s got a great (potential) line-up of characters, an incredible (back) story, setting and promise, but the authenticity got lost somewhat because the letter writers’ voices did not differentiate enough to me and the reader could only see the one dimension of the letter writer’s point-of-view. I loved the part of the story that told of the occupation. The characters came to life during those sections. It was the protagonist, Juliet’s story that unravelled for me, or rather her love story. The set up was that she corresponds first with Dawsey, a tall, silent type. Little is revealed of Dawsey in his letters, so the reader can’t wait to meet him when Juliet travels to Guernsey. The anticipation is all there, except that for the rest of the novel, we are told about Dawsey, that he’s there, but we never hear direct from him. We miss all the nuances of dialogue and direct speech. The interaction between the pair is not explored and the excuse for the lack of interaction is attributed to Dawsey being so quiet. He was so quiet in the end that he failed to exist for me. His invisibility rendered the relationship incredible. (Dialogue is non-existent too, and reported dialogue  rare and brief.) The absence of letters from Dawsey in the latter half of the book means that his responses and attitudes are told rather than shown. I simply stopped seeing him as more than a shadowy figure on the page.

Words,tone and body language are things we show in prose writing. In letters, diary entries, telegrams, we lose opportunities to show the character’s physical responses, actions, body language or tone, unless we TELL. Or maybe that’s another crafting technique I need to investigate.

I think the biggest problem for me in the epistolary novel is that all the action occurs off-stage. Usually that’s a big no-no in novel but it seems inevitable in the epistolary form. I’m no expert though, so I did a little Googling and reading up to discover the pros and cons of writing novel in epistolary form.

Here’s a few findings and summations:

Epistolary novel Pros:

• Easy way to compose a novel for a beginner
• Manageable chunks – written one by one build into a whole story
• Authenticity and brevity
• All attention is on characters (this could be a con too if you lose connection to or miss out on building dramatic intensity in the story)
• Glimpse different characters’ lives intimately
• No viewpoint problems
• Opportunity to share multiple viewpoints

Epistolary novel Cons:

• No dialogue, miss the nuances of interactions
• Hard to get to know characters in relationship context
• Hard to show variances in characterisation unless done well
• Can become narrowly focused
• Difficult to show intimate moments i.e. sex (who writes to anyone about their sex life and, really, do we want to correspond with those that do?)
• Action occurs off-stage leading to loss of dramatic immediacy
• Never witness anything directly
• Can result in lack of character variation – need to really mix up letter styles and voices
• Not every character’s thoughts may interest the reader
• POV can colour reader’s perspective (I can see this could work equally as a deliberate pro/device)

Maybe it all comes down to how well an author masters the form. I don’t think it’s a medium I could sustain throughout a novel-length, but I certainly found myself interested to analyse it from a critical point-of-view. And that can be the death of reading for pure enjoyment for writers. We tend to look at aspects a normal reader wouldn’t think twice about it. I thought I’d finish with a short list of epistolary novels across the centuries. Their popularity may be said to have waned a bit over the last couple of centuries but judging by the huge success of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society and others such as We Need to Talk about Kevin and Bridget Jones Diary it holds a captive audience still.

So do you enjoy novels written in letters? Would you write one? Love to know your thoughts and favourites and what appeals or doesn’t about epistolary novels. Sorry this has turned into one of my typical epistles.