After 25 Years, an Influential Epistolary Novel Series Mails Its Last Letter

“I’ve decided to throw caution to the wind and meet up with the woman I’ve been corresponding with for over a year. I realize the absurdity of leaving everything behind for a woman I’ve never seen, but I love her.” So writes Griffin Moss, a lonely painter in London, of his mysterious muse, Sabine Strohem. The pair was first introduced in the 1991 best-seller Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence, an epistolary novel composed of extensively illustrated postcards and removable handwritten letters by author and artist Nick Bantock.

Their story unfolded over the course of six genre-bending books: One day, Griffin receives a postcard from a woman named Sabine, an illustrator of postage stamps in the unmapped Sicmon Islands. Sabine could see Griffin’s artwork as he created it, she claimed –– and proved it in subsequent letters. Griffin, convinced he invented this woman, fears he’s going insane. But through exchanging hundreds of artworks and letters, Griffin and Sabine fall in love. Their thwarted attempts to meet in person leave them, and readers, mystified.

These lovelorn letter-writers return in The Pharos Gate: Griffin & Sabine’s Lost Correspondence (Chronicle), published alongside a 25th anniversary edition of the first book in the series. In this new and final installment, Griffin and Sabine agree to meet, at last, at the Pharos Gate, one of the oldest structures in Alexandria, revered by the ancients as a portal to the underworld. The shadowy villain Frolatti, intent from the beginning on preventing Griffin and Sabine from ever uniting, stalks them on their journeys through Spain, Turkey, and the South Seas with packs of sinister dogs.

Like its predecessors, the book is a mystical love story free of the sappiness and cliché we normally associate with those types of tales. Bantock marries image and text to create both a book and an art object in itself. In its pages are actual envelopes printed with antique maps and fantasy illustrations; they house folded, removable typewritten letters, covered in petroglyph-like doodles. The letters themselves are magical realist prose poems, filled with meditations on love (“You and I were born inside each other, like changelings inverted within a prism”); comic observations (“I know nothing about Papua New Guinea other than it looks like a camel hopping over Australia”); and notes on Jungian psychology and art (“Even the most talented of artists finds it incredibly difficult to replicate a thought”). Through Frolatti’s threatening dispatches, Bantock explores the anxieties and obstacles that prevent human connection. This “malicious harpy,” Sabine writes, is “the one charged with making sure none of us wakes up and throws off the dark despondency that was cast over humankind in order to keep us small and alone.”

Bantock, who designs apps in addition to writing and painting, is no luddite — he created an electronic version of his tale, Griffin & Sabine: The Interactive Trilogy, last year. But the Pharos Gate is an especially nostalgic read in the age of email/texting/Tinder messaging, when written correspondence has been visually homogenized, stripped of any tactility and romance. Despite telling myself I’d read The Pharos Gate in one uninterrupted sitting, by page 5 I’d been distracted by two texts, three emails, and a few Slack chats. The book became a reminder of what’s lost in the noise of constant connectedness, aside from the ability to focus on the words in front of you: The ritual of opening a mysterious envelope; the quirks of handwriting (Griffin’s is a Comic Book-like all caps, Sabine’s a calligraphic italic in rust brown); the look and feel of paper; the tiny artworks that are postcards and postage stamps, illustrated here with parrots, steamboats, and portraits of queens. It all makes for a dazzling conclusion to the pair’s long “search for [their] equal opposites,” their desire to “step beyond the mortal realm.” Maybe, once there, they’ll send a postcard home.

The Pharos Gate: Griffin & Sabine’s Lost Correspondence and the 25th anniversary edition of Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence are available from Chronicle.