When was the last time you wrote a letter – or received one? Sadly, most of what arrives through the letterbox is a miserable mixture of bills and takeaway flyers, but there was a time when the snap of the letterbox was a cause for great excitement, or immense anxiety.
In our age of social media apps and smartphones, there is little need for pen and paper. Address books are all but forgotten, gathering dust at the back of desk drawers. Once-lengthy emails are abbreviated text messages and emoticons. We are rushed and brief in our communications. Yes, it’s inexpensive. Yes, it’s immediate. But where’s the care, the thought, the emotion? Have we become lazy in how we communicate with family and friends, or have we forgotten the simple pleasure of sending and receiving letters?
There is something undeniably romantic about a handwritten letter. The process and preparation of applying ink to paper lends so much more to the act of communication. It becomes a tactile experience, one of sensations and emotions. Choosing the writing paper, testing your pen on an odd scrap, sitting at a desk, hand gently guiding the paper. Little flourishes and drawings in the margins to illustrate meaning. Envelope and stamp. The trip to the post box. It takes time and thought, care and consideration.
There’s also a wonderful permanency in letters. A historical record. A moment, captured forever. Much of what we can learn from history is contained in archived letters of ordinary people caught up in very extraordinary events. To read those snippets of everyday life, to understand how people expressed themselves can tell us so much about the people and places from our past. How will future generations know the social history that precedes them if our communication is all contained in a jumble of smiley faces in the Cloud; a place that belongs to companies that may easily fail, an impermanent record that can be wiped clean at any moment?
The lost art of letter writing is perhaps what makes the epistolary novel an appealing literary device to writers, and readers. There is something undeniably voyeuristic about reading someone’s private thoughts, shared through letters, diaries, journals and telegrams, and it makes for a very intimate reading experience. We see the characters’ most personal thoughts, intended only to be shared with one other. Reading these very personal forms of communication is akin to finding a box of old letters in your granny’s attic, or stumbling across a stranger’s journal, left behind in a hotel room. We probably shouldn’t look, but of course we do.
For the historical novelist, the epistolary novels lends an added layer of historical authenticity. Letters and telegrams were the only form of communication between loved ones during the Great War. The anticipation of news from the trenches, the agony of long weeks without word, the despair of the telegram boy’s knock on the door encapsulate much of the raw emotion unique to wartime.
Yet, in spite of the historical and emotional appeal, the epistolary form poses its own unique set of challenges. Letters leave little room for dialogue, a device often used to create dramatic tension between characters. Without dialogue, the characters must create that tension through their reflections, or in the way they might misread someone’s reply. Postal delays, lost letters, unsent letters and letters crossing in the post all provide an alternative way to weave in this tension and conflict, to replace the usual dialogue and scene-setting. Neither is a character in an epistolary novel likely to write volumes of descriptive prose to another character. The novelist must, instead, be creative, constructing a sensory landscape for the reader with poignant and carefully placed visceral details, whilst always being true to the tone and style of letter writing during the era their novel is set in. But despite the challenges, there is a wonderful intimacy and immediacy in an epistolary novel – both in the writing, and the reading.
As for letters themselves, have we really fallen out of love with them, or have we simply forgotten how special and powerful they can be? Next time you want to share news with a friend or a family member, why not take pen to paper? The unexpected surprise of a letter, written with care and carried across the miles, is worth a thousand texts and may even be read with the same care and consideration a hundred years from now. Your LOLs and FOMOs? Not so much.
Last Christmas in Paris: A Novel of the First World War, by Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb, (HarperCollins) is available now
