Transcript: Ken Bolton’s launch speech for Chinese Postman by Brian Castro
Chinese Postman by Brian Castro was launched in Adelaide at the Ern Malley wine bar in November 2024. Read a lightly edited excerpt from Ken Bolton’s launch speech below, or download the full version – which is ‘set out with spacing indicative of intended delivery’ – here. The event was presented by the J.M. Coetzee Centre. You can also read a transcript of Castro’s launch speech here.
Brian Castro’s novels were seen from the first as impressively intellectual. I remember – I was a young writer, a poet, and actually not much concerned with Australian novels – when Double-Wolf came out and was greeted as ‘an Intellectual novel’.
Was this a warning to readers, I wondered, or a defence of the reviewer’s uncertain performance?
Despite this characterisation as formidably intelligent, Brian’s books win awards.
If you check, this is true of nearly every one. Brian Castro is the real thing – which is why we are here.
…
In the early pages [of Chinese Postman], as I marvelled at the writing, every sentence, almost, seeming to produce a fabulous insight, or wonderfully expressed conception. I remember thinking, Wow, this is as good as Adorno.
What is the novel about? What does it deal with? Or deal in?
Chinese Postman is philosophical: a look at memory, at ageing and age; a joke about the constraining patterns that old age can bring: patterns of thought or patterns of preoccupation and revision; thoughts about desires – former, or lingering, or unachieved; about goals, ideals, fixations; about a search for validation.
It is about the question of whether a life has a story or a shape (and does it have a good one?) and about the recognition that most of this will be in vain. The novel is partly an object lesson in the impossibility of preparing for death.
Structurally Chinese Postman presents not so much a Plot as A Situation. One that involves asymmetries, and uncertain elements. Can these be overcome, can the situation resolve into something acceptable?
The seeming near success in bringing this about, and the actual failure at the last hurdle, give a final irony: the failure arrives as an endorsement, and as foreseeable. Quin is caught-out by what, all along, might have been predicted. But if you’re a pessimist, in losing you win.
As Quin dies this failure will confirm his thinking and give him a chuckle: ‘Right Again!’
