The Pen Friend [Hardcover]

This is an astonishing book. Essentially it is a series of responses to minimalist postcards arriving from a woman known twenty years earlier. The first person character writes his unposted addresses to her in fountain pens which all have to be described and placed in their historical contexts, and made relevant to his experiences with her.
And the mind of the writer meanders lavishly through themes raised by simple distractions (the sight of a headline in a newspaper) as much as by recollections of important events in the relationship.
Reading it we learn precious little about the woman to whom these reflections are addressed but we perhaps get drawn into the obsessive compulsive mind of the narrator and start to share his wonder at a complex and beautiful world.

Cairan Carson's "The Pen Friend" is a beautiful, insinuating and eventually spellbinding novel written with all the elegance and precision one would expect from one of Ireland's leading poets.

"The Pen Friend" is comprised of a series of meditative, unposted letters written by Gabriel Conway, recently retired as Head Keeper of the Belfast Municipal Gallery, to Nina, his ex-lover of twenty years ago. Gabriel met Nina in a Belfast cafe in the early eighties and was attracted to her not only by her appearance but also by her clothes, her perfume and the small, Dinkie lady's fountain pen that she wore on a chain around her neck. Nina, an Englishwoman, though with a Dutch father, was assigned to work in the province by Mass Observation 2 - or possibly some other, even more shadowy organization. After two years, she broke off the affair and left Belfast under ambiguous circumstances, providing no forwarding address.

Gabriel begins writing "to" Nina when he receives the first in a series of thirteen carefully selected picture postcards inscribed with a brief, cryptic message unmistakably in her hand. At one level, his letters reconstruct their affair - there is a lot of "I said, you said" reminiscence. At another level, they launch into a chain of meditations on a wide variety of subjects evoked by the postcards or the first-degree memories that they have triggered. These topics include art, Esperanto, dreams, spiritualism, the Troubles, his father, perfumes, fountain pens (of which he has now become a collector, inspired by that original Dinkie). While this approach might have deteriorated into the didactic or derivative, Carson has managed it adroitly. His mini tutorials are fascinating in themselves and they form a rich complexion. For example one of Nina's inscriptions, "In dreams begin responsibilities," is taken from Yeats; Yeats was a major exponent of spiritualism and of the Dream-Vision, both of which are treated in the book; in Irish poetry aisling is the appearance in a dream of Ireland herself in the form of a woman. Gabriel's name itself is very close to that of Gabriel Conroy, Joyce's character in "The Dubliners," a work which itself is discussed in the book, and so on. This very superficial exegesis barely scratches the surface of what is a mesmerizing and rich weave. This is a novel, which demands several readings.

Carson's technique takes us intensely though narrowly into Gabriel's mind - we actually do not know much about him and yet we enter deep into his psyche. I began to suspect that Gabriel himself was the sender of "Nina's" postcards, that he selected them fetishly from his shoebox of mementoes from solitary trips, that perhaps Nina had never existed, or existed only as a woman observed in a café at a distance, with a Dinkie pen on a chain around her neck. This is hinted at in one of the reconstructed dialogues: "perhaps even then you made me up." Carson's closing line, with its delicious, almost playful ambiguity, would also support but not demand this interpretation. This hint of near madness adds edge to all that has gone before.

As a final note, this wonderful edition by the Blackstaff Press beautifully complements the narrative. It is printed on rich, creamy paper and each chapter is preceded by a reproduction of the picture postcard in question and each chapter heading includes a tiny etching of the fountain pen used by Gabriel as he composes his responses. Bravo!